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IFH 716: How Master Storytellers Keep the Audience Engaged with Richard Walter · Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast

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  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
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  podcasts, just go to IFH podcast network dot com. Welcome to the Indie
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  Filmhustle Podcast, Episode number seven sixteen, Except no one's definition of your life,
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  Define it yourself. Harvey Fiersty broadcasting from the back alley in Hollywood.
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  It's the Indie Film Hustle Podcast, where we show you how to survive and
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  thrive as an indie filmmaker in the jungles of the film biz. And here's
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  your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to another episode of the Indie
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  Film Hustle Podcast. I am your humble host, Alex Ferrari. Today's show
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  is sponsored by Rise of the Film Entrepreneur How to turn your independent film into
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  dot com. That's film bizbook dot com. Enjoy today's episode with guest host
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  Dave Bullis. This concluding academic year lie first is the new academic year.
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  Of course, this is the concluding thirty eighth year. So I've seen a
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  lot, but I'm recalling years and years ago, and one of the things
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  I've seen is, oh, about twenty five years ago, actually probably a
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  little longer than that. The arts at UCLA all across the campus were reconfigured
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  and the Film School, which was part of the Theater Arts department was turned
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  into a long was turned into a separate two separate departments, the Film,
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  TV, Digital Media. On one hand, that's my department and our assistant
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  apartment, the theater department, and we aren't together in the School of Theater,
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  Film and Television. And years ago when we were still the Theater Department,
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  there was a retreat up to Lake Garrowhead. There's a very beautiful,
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  upscale, gorgeous conference center up in the mountains, just about an hour hour
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  and a half from the campus. And the whole subject that was discussed up
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  there for the weekends was the spelling of the word theater. There were some
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  people who wanted to change it from the ear to the r e. It's
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  terribly unimportant, but I am on the side of the er people. Well
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  though it was after two days of robust and vigorous and eager discussion, it
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  was decided without any equivocation, without any hesitancy to discuss this further out another
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  retreat. Yeah. I mean, it's like it's been said of the universities,
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  that university it's just like a corporation, except that there's no bottom line
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  and there's no calendar. Now both of those things are completely untrue today.
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  You know, they're universities, especially here in California, but all across the
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  country are very much in touch with the notion of the bottom line, as
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  you know, support for public education, retreats, and not only at the
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  university level, but much more grievously I think at the K through through twelve
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  level, and calendar is very much attached to budget issues and so on.
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  So fascinating any place to spend the life. That said, there's no escaping
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  the you know, these bureaucratic issues, they're not you may unique to public
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  universities or private universities, but all institutions, corporations, non profits, governmental
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  agencies. You know, nothing ever runs real smoothly, and people should stop
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  explaining it to you know, and and trying to make do because what else
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  can you do. So in any event, there I am very sympathetic with
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  what you're saying. The organizing principle of my life has always been no meetings.
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  I don't do like as much as I can avoid it for exam,
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  and yesterday I was at an awards lunch and I had to be there.
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  I am also the associate dean now of the School of Theater, Film,
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  and television, and I have to be there for the awards, the ceremony,
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  you know, they give out scholarships and stuff like that and celebrate the
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  students. But I'm reminded of a line in one of my favorite lines in
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  olive movies, in Oliver Stone's Wall Street, there's a line. There's a
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  moment where Gecko, you know, Michael Douglas. I'm sure you've seen that.
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  I expect you've seen the movie. He's on the he's fielding like eleven
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  phone calls at the same time. At one point he says, lunch.
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  You know, clearly somebody's invited him to lunch and it's his lunch, and
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  he scouses his lunch is for whimps, and he hangs up, you know,
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  and I say, lunch is for whimps, I believe, you know,
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  my first obligation to the university as professor in a research institution like the
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  University of California, the first set second obligation is teaching. The first obligation
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  is what they call in the traditional disciplines research, and in the arts they
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  call the creative activity. But that's the first obligation that I have, and
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  I can't do that, and that all the faculty have, but we can't
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  do that if we don't have the time to do that. So one does
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  need to be a warrior for one's writing time. If you follow what I'm
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  saying, and I'm just responding to your talking, all these meetings are previous.
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  Chair she had a sign. I loved her because because she had a
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  sign on her desk on a little table at her in her office that said
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  this meeting is costing. And then there was a blank you know, fill
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  in the number, you know, next to a dollar sign. So I'm
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  always sympathetic with what you're talking about. You know, there was a book
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  I was just reading, Richard. It was called The Power of No,
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  and basically it's that one word you could use just sort of the crux of
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  the book is if you say the word yes, you inherit all that person's
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  problem. So like if Richard, what would you like to go to lunch?
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  And you say yes, well, well, you know it's it's funny
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  because there's a self help guru who died I think last years, very well
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  known, Stephen Covey, who wrote a book that is translated into like one
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  hundred and sixty seven languages. You know, several of which are not even
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  identifiable. I mean, he sold millions of millions of copies of this book,
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  and it's called something like those Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or something
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  like that. And in that book he says at one point he has a
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  he has something he calls six words for serenity, and he there are own
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  less, do less, say no. And that's what you're talking about.
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  I have had to learn how to say no. Uh. You know,
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  it's a necessary condition when I'm asked to do things that I just can't do,
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  rather than sort of play along, go along and so on. You
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  know, there's all kinds of ways to say. It's a student. I
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  just got a request, for example, for the summer, a student,
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  and you know there. I love the greatest thing about UCLA and the greatest
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  thing about teaching is the students. Uh. And I love our I love
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  our students. But there is among young people and and maybe college students in
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  particular, maybe especially prestige students in glamor programs like UCLA. I mean,
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  it is the you know, those major film schools like my own, Alma,
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  modern USC, like NYU, like like certainly like UCLA. We are
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  the glamour corner of higher and learning. So the people who do get in,
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  it's very competitive. They maybe, you know, they they're very gifted
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  and they used to get getting their own way, and I think maybe they're
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  unique entitled, you know, they have a sense of unique entitlement. Say,
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  somebody just announced to me, and this is somebody I really have a
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  fond of and a very fine writer, a student in a program that he's
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  decided to take an independent study with me this summer. I don't get paid
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  for that, by the way. He will, and of course I have
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  to consent to it. He can't just announce it, although he felt that
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  he could. That he's just entitled to it, and he's going to if
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  he has his way. Uh, you know, meet with me this summer
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  and discuss his outline for a screenplay after I look it over, and then
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  we'll meet several times. I'll review the pages and give them notes and so
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  on. All I do that, you know, for eight writers every quarter.
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  We're on the quarter system at UCLA routinely. But I'm not going to
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  do that this summer. You know, I'm working on my own stuff.
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  I have all kinds of things planned. We'll be right back a word from
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  our sponsor, and now back to the show. But rather than just say
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  no, what I told him was that I wished I could do that,
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  which is only partly true, and however, that I would not be able
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  to give him and his screenplay the time and the attention and the consideration that
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  they both merit. So that's a polite way to say no. But you
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  do need to learn how to say no. And I've also said in Hollywood
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  dealing in the movie business, you're a hard no. No. This is
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  not for us. As painful as that is, it's not as painful as
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  what one usually hears when one submits a project, either to potential representatives or
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  to a production company. One usually hears is this you know what I mean?
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  The silence is definitely yeah, very shrill, very shrill silence. So
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  I'm sympathetically what you're you're talking about. You do need to I mean,
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  I consider it actually part of my my my pedagog if I could call it
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  that, My teaching philosophy is to teach students. We are a professional program,
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  a graduate program. We offer the Master Fine Arts. I trying to
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  teach them by example how they need to be even warriors for their own writing
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  time. I once had a definition I used to climb around about a definition
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  of a writer. A writer is somebody who's always available to pick up relatives
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  at the airport. And I've preached to writers that if they when they complain,
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  oh, you know, I can't get any done them, the family
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  wants me to you know, they think I'm available to pick up people over
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  there. I said, well, you are available. I mean you did
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  get picked them up. I didn't you, So why you know, if
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  you don't get it, you're going to get it. You know. It's
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  one of my principles, which is if you want to be treated as a
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  professional writer, you have to treat yourself as a professional. And the fact
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  is people who are going to pick up relatives at the equot but they don't
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  realize is they're actually glad to do that because it allows them to avoid doing
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  what every writer wants to avoid doing, and that is writing. And not
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  only that I get to do to feel virtuous about it, and to get
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  the gripe and catch and carp and complain about everybody intinging on their time,
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  when in fact they're terrified to sit a loan in front of that word processor,
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  you know, and the relatives coming in from out of town has given
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  them the excuse not to do that. If you follow me, yeah,
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  I absolutely follow you. Because there's a book that I read, The War
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  of Art, by Stephen Pressfield. He's a genius. Press Field, He's
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  just I love that book. Yeah absolutely, And you know I was fortunate
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  enough to be able to speak with him briefly and I old him you know,
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  reading that book was an epiphany for me. Oh absolutely, I just
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  love the book. In fact, I was just quoting and somebody. I
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  do a lot of consulting off campus. I give notes to writers who have
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  deals at studios. You know, it's becoming more and more routine in Hollywood
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  now, even when you have a deal, you know, typical writing assignment
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  is what they call, and it's whatever is negotiable, you know, as
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  long as the guild minimums are being observed. The typical assignment is what they
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  call a draft and a set. A draft is a draft of a screenplay,
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  and a set usually consists of what somebody will call a rewrite and somebody
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  else, and then it'll be followed by what somebody calls a polish. But
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  of course the guy uh doing the polish and the guy doing the rewrite have
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  different views of you know, what what it should be let should be called.
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  But often between such stages, UH, smart writers will go to somebody
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  like me, a script doctor of script consultants, and say, listen,
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  they owe me, you know, I owe I owe them this trapt before
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  I handed in. Ask me. You know, I want you to ask
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  me the hard questions because the studio asks them and and and so on.
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  So I was talking to But I also work with writers who, you know,
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  who are independent and who can afford my very very high fees to give
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  those kinds of notes. You know, It's easier for a writer who's getting
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  a quarter of any them a fee from Paramount Pictures to do that happen than
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  somebody out of out of their own pocket. But I do work with writers
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  off campus. As I say, who can have Again, if I'm attracted
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  to the script, I think it's something that I want to you know,
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  if you feel merits encouragement, and then of course it costs a lot of
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  money. So I was working with somebody. I'm working with a particular writer.
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  It was in the Midwest, and sheet I just sent her back a
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  a second raft of notes. Oh, it's about a fifteen page document,
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  going through her script and talking about it in general, but also going through
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  the page is not page for page, and indicating where there are certain issues
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  that are around, some of them as trivial as typos, and some of
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  them, uh, you know, fundamental issues about character and story structure and
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  whatever. And she complained to me that she was really disappointed that there's more
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  work to do, that she thought she had the whole thing set up,
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  and that she's kind of sorry that things aren't proceeding, you know, according
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  to schedule, you know, in the way that she predicted. And I
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  immediately thought of press Field, who I know what he would say. Stephen
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  would say that her only amateurs and dilettants think that it goes, you know,
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  in a steady, predictable, reliable way. That it's not herkey,
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  jerky and frustrating every inch of the way. You know. Press Field would
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  say, stop trying to feel good about it, you know, feel good
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  about having done it, but don't feel good about doing it. Nobody does,
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  No writer does it. One of my first principles is all writers hate
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  to write. We love having written, but actually sitting down and addressing the
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  pages. That's what press Field goals. Resistance. There's always resistance sitting there.
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  And I have a lot of experience as a writer over my years.
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  I've been writing professionally for more than forty years. But my own experience is
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  leveraged by the experience I've had with other writers, working very very closely,
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  very intimately with writers on campus and off campus, and so you know,
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  I have the experience also of all of those writers. And that's the way
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  it is for everybody, for everybody, including the highest handed, you know,
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  highest minded, most successful, richest practitioners. It's always that way,
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  and people have to, you know, stop trying to feel good about it.
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  You know. It's like Steven said one time, he said, uh,
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  you know, if you can beat resistance inch by inch and you can
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  actually get something made, and you can actually you know, you sit there
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  and there's a polished manuscript, and he says, congratulations. Now move on
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  to the next one. Exactly. I quote a student of mind. He
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  wrote two scripts in class that became gigantically successful films. They became franchise as
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  one as Highlander maybe they they called it The Highlander, and the other one
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  is Backdraft. I mean, Backdraft became an amusement park ride, you know,
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  I mean, it's gigantic success. And so here was this twenty six
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  year old writer, multi millionaire. Already I was reading an interview with him
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  in the press. This is some years ago, and he was again just
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  like writers, complaining and you think he'd beat something for joy and you know,
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  whistling a happy tune. No, he was talking about how they had
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  betrayed him at Fox, how they had dissed him at NBC, and burned
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  him at Warner Brothers and lied to him at Paramount and on and on.
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  You know, all of these dramas, and you know, acts of these
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  crimes that had been visited upon him, This poor poor guy, this poor
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  multimillionaire, twenty six year old screenwriter. And then he pauses in the interview,
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  and I swear if you held the interview this is a press you know,
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  a print piece, if you held the news page close to your face,
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  you could have felt the waft of his sigh. If you know what
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  I'm saying, He felt a breeze on his cheek. It was that palpable
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  in the context of what he was saying was quoting me, he was saying,
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  Ah, but I can just hear. After he's griping and complaining,
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  he says, oh, but I can just hear. My professor Richard Walter
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  of Mucila say mcgreg don't you know it's the privilege in Hollywood, even merely
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  to be mistreated this way? Again, what Hollywood will do to you the
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  worst than Hollywood will do to he is not mistreat you, but ignore you.
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  I have an experience I met with Rest his soul, Julius Epstein.
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  He's He and his brother and another writer wrote Casablanca and among many other things
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  that Julius was involved in. He lived, he was working well into his
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  eighties. He passed a few years ago. Now, rest his soul.
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  He uh. When I first time I met him, I said, oh,
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  mister Epstein, I'm so excited to meet you. The only you know
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  all I hope, all of all I or any of my film phony palels,
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  all we hope for is his wants in our lives. We should touch
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  something as you did with Casablanca. It's timeless, that's eternal. That is
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  going to you know, touch the hearts and minds of generation. Something like
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  that. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now
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  back to the show. Yeah, it wouldn't be nice affected report to you
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  that. He said, Oh, thanks very much, kind of you to
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  say so. I mean, that would be courtesy one oh one. You
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  know, Uh, he's a writer. You gotta understand. He grew up
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  in Brooklyn, but he spent seventy years in la but he never lost the
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  Brooklyn drawl that he had. And his reply to me was, cassi blankish
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  Messiblanca. They fucked that up. You know what a part where Floyd Rayne
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  says such and such a day. But oh no, they wanted with my
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  brother Philip. I mean we had a thing with it. And here he
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  is complaining, you know, more than a half century later, like sixty
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  seventy years later, about how they messed up his movie, what movie Casablanca?
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  And all I could think is, my god, I wish somebody would
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  mess up my movie like they messed up Casablanca. So, you know,
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  again, only amateurs and dilettants think you're just settled in eagerly in front of
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  the word processor, and you know, you take a deep breath and you
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  kind of just get into your creative zone and it just kind of flowes out
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  of your magically, you know, just ain't that way? Ain't that way?
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  And the other thing is people and never you can't get no satisfaction.
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  If I may quote the Rolling Stones, it's never as good as people think
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  that it should as the writer herself or himself thinks it ought to be.
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  It's always better in the mind, you know, when it's not an actual
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  tangible old in your hand, it's always more perfect than when it's a real
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  thing. You know. So there is a quality of frustration and disappointment that
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  walks hand in hand with creativity. And professionals know that they accept that,
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  they tolerant, that they endure it, they don't like it, and amateurs
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  deny it. It's amazing that the screen mode of Casa Blanca actually, you
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  know, had of problems with it because you know, that's the movie,
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  that's the go to movie that you know, almost every screenwriting professor I've ever
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  had, or you know book I've ever you know read, that's one of
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  the two movies that they use as a paradigm for this is this is what
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  a great movie or sorry, this is what an excellent movie is. You
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  know, yes, well it's what a great screenplay is, and it is
• 22:26
  a great movement, and it's beautifully acted and beautifully directed. I quite agree
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  with you. And yet the actual writer of that, you know, thinks
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  say so so. But then there is also a trend kind of that I've
• 22:38
  detected among writers where if you talk to a really successful writer and you asking
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  what's the favorite thing that you wrote, They're going to pick their most obscure,
• 22:47
  least successful project, you know, almost to make up for the disappointment
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  that they experienced when it was was released. As I say, one praise
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  for disappointment when something because you'll never be disappointed if something isn't released, you
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  know what I mean. So again I tell my writers, and I tell
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  my colleagues around the table from at the time at UCLA on the faculty,
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  that fantasy is for your screenplay, for your life reality. So you know,
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  as we we talked about, you know, just you know about writing,
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  and you know some disappointments you know in your classes. What I wanted
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  to ask, you know, it was when whenever a student comes to you,
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  you know, how do you know what's a good concept and what's not?
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  Well, you don't, you don't you never know what's a good concept.
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  You never I'm going to tell you two concepts right now that are the
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  stupidest concepts for movies. You will never hear a stupider concept for a movie
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  than uh than either of these. Ready, I mean, let me let
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  me let me before I say that, let me let me mention Blake Snyder
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  and Save the Cat. He argues that if you're a writer and you have
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  a concept, you should run that concept past some some other people. He
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  actually says you should stop people in the street, and especially young people,
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  and telling hey, can I talk to you for a minute. I'm a
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  writer, and I have a notion for and I you know, for a
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  screenplay of a concept, and I'm wondering I'd love to, you know,
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  talk you through it for a minute or two and see what you think of
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  it, whether you think I'm like you know, it be a mistake to
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  move forward or resist the worthy. And now, imagine you were walking down
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  the street and somebody comes up to you and wants to run a concept past
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  you, and you and you're generous enough most people probably would say, well,
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  all right, all right, you know, let's hear it. Because
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  and you did that, and the guy gave you the following concept. You're
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  ready, I'm ready. A man stutters, but he has to give a
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  speech, so he hires a speech there this, and they work on the
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  speech, and then he gives the speech. What if somebody's what if you
• 25:07
  said to like, well, I gotta tell you, honestly, you know,
• 25:08
  you seem like a really good guy. And but you know that sounds
• 25:11
  just oh let's I mean, who could possibly care about what you just described?
• 25:17
  What if he then said he will, all, well, you know,
• 25:19
  thanks, just the same. But respectfully, let me tell you that
• 25:22
  I happen to think this this. When it's all done, it's going to
• 25:26
  win the screenplay, you know, best Screenplay, Oscar and best movie.
• 25:32
  You'd figure crank up the lithium on this guy's drip. It's madness, you
• 25:37
  know. And yet I don't have to tell you what movie that is.
• 25:38
  I'm sure. Oh how about this? Somebody comes up and says, I
• 25:44
  want to do I have an idea for a cable series. I think it's
• 25:47
  going to be sixty two hours. It's going to run for you know,
• 25:49
  five seasons or six season. It's gonna be sixty two hours of programming.
• 25:55
  And here's the idea A here's the concept. A high school chemistry teacher gets
• 26:00
  a cancer diagnosis and he say, he decides, in order to provide for
• 26:08
  his family, to partner with a former incorrigible student and go into the meth
• 26:15
  trade to manufacture and cell methodphetamine. One of these well, Ida, that's
• 26:22
  how that doesn't sounding much of a concept that would work one of these all.
• 26:26
  I think it's going to turn into sixty two hours of unparalleled genius.
• 26:30
  I don't mind telling you I am one of those people who regards Breaking Bad
• 26:34
  as one of the greatest achievements in the history of civilization. In fact,
• 26:38
  last Saturday I was at just a week ago today, I was at the
• 26:41
  pitch Fest in Burbank, big screen ranking festival have every year, and I've
• 26:47
  actually met Tom Snaw's and Peter Goulds, who are the forces behind Better called
• 26:53
  Saul, which of course grew out of Breaking Bad, and I just trem
• 27:00
  to meet them. You know, I have to shake their hands that wrote
• 27:03
  those all of those uh beautiful Breaking Bad episodes. They were prominent writers,
• 27:07
  producers and occasionally I think directed some of the Breaking Bad episodes. So it's
• 27:12
  not about ideas it's not about concepts. It's about story. The story is
• 27:18
  all. It's about stories everything, and that's what we preach at UCLA.
• 27:25
  And you know, if the proof is in the tasting we've we've you know,
• 27:29
  there's a lot of evidence that we're we're not wrong about that. Yeah,
• 27:33
  I you know, I sawd the some of the accomplishments you know,
• 27:37
  uh they some of your students have done, and that that is just phenomenal.
• 27:41
  And you know that's why, you know, you were the guy that
• 27:44
  I wanted to talk to if you were you know, when I was in
• 27:45
  the early stage of this podcast, you were one of the of the people
• 27:48
  that I actually marked down to talk to. And I'm so happy that we
• 27:52
  actually got to talk. Now we'll get too and I'm flattered by what you're
• 27:56
  saying. I thank you kindly. Oh, completely my pleasure. And just
• 28:00
  you know, to to continue talking about your class. You know you mentioned
• 28:03
  before an outline, So do you have your students actually you know sort of
• 28:07
  uh fusht fush out their stories through an outline? And how if so,
• 28:12
  how detailed do they have to go with that outline? Well, the first
• 28:15
  answer is yes, I do have them do an outline, but I also
• 28:18
  tell them to throw away the outline once I get started writing. It's not
• 28:23
  terribly detailed when we have our each quarter. We have three ten week quarters
• 28:30
  at UCLA, where most institutions have two semesters, you know, fifteen week
• 28:36
  semesters, and at the Big I work each quarter. I've taught the course
• 28:41
  now over one hundred times with students, eight students around the table writing a
• 28:48
  you know, feature length screenplay, and each one has to We meet once
• 28:52
  a week for three hours, the whole group. But oh I do meet
• 28:53
  with them multiple times during the quarter, independently individually to two really one on
• 29:00
  one where we review the pages together. You know, I read the pages.
• 29:06
  Having read the pages, I meet and give them my notes I have.
• 29:11
  Everybody has to bring the second week of that class. They have to
• 29:14
  bring in a maximum two page kind of a beat sheet, sort of a
• 29:18
  scene list. It's not really an outline, but it's a sort of a
• 29:22
  document that helps the writer have a general direction that the script is going.
• 29:30
  But then I tell everybody to stay open to the surprises. The last thing
• 29:34
  you want to do is drag something back to, you know, an earlier
• 29:40
  notion that you had if it's working better in a new fashion. You know,
• 29:45
  I never knew a writer who wasn't surprised by lines of dialogue that our
• 29:51
  characters spoke. You don't seem to invent by themselves. We'll be right back
• 29:56
  after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. You
• 30:04
  know, by twists and turns in the story that they didn't they weren't even
• 30:10
  aware of, even though they are creating the whole thing. There is a
• 30:14
  kind of a magic to it. I had Neil Simon come to class to
• 30:22
  talk about comedy. Imagine being in a writing class and having, you know,
• 30:27
  Neil Simon comedy. It's like being in seminary. And you know,
• 30:32
  he was announcing at two o'clock in room nine, the Lord will be doing
• 30:36
  a Q and A, you know. And I asked mister Simon, I
• 30:41
  said, do you laugh at your own jokes? And he said, sure,
• 30:45
  I do the first time I hear them. And I think that's a
• 30:48
  great line. It's as if his jokes are not made up by him,
• 30:52
  but cold to him, by the characters that he creates. I don't know
• 30:56
  any writer who hasn't had that experience. So yes, I do think you
• 31:00
  have to have an outline, but I think you have to then sort of
• 31:03
  throw away the outline and expect the script to unfold in a way that will
• 31:08
  surprise not only people who read it but the person who wrote it, you
• 31:14
  know. Very true. And there was a book and I can't remember the
• 31:15
  name it off top of my head. I think it may be in the
• 31:18
  artist way, but the author of that book, Julia Cameron, Yes,
• 31:22
  I yes. And one of the methods that she describes in that book was
• 31:26
  basically, you know, just sort of starting and just going and don't worry
• 31:32
  about, you know, having a plan, you know, meaning like you
• 31:34
  know what a detailed outline means. Well, there's something. There's something to
• 31:37
  be said for that. El Doctor Rao, who's not a screenwriter to my
• 31:41
  knowledge, but a very very successful novelist who's some substantial number of his novels
• 31:47
  have been made into movies. He's probably best known for Ragtime. He says
• 31:52
  driving he compares writing to driving at night. You can only see as far
• 31:59
  as the headlights reveal. But that's long enough, that's far enough to drive,
• 32:05
  you know, the whole journey. He also describes Ragtime how he came
• 32:10
  up with Ragtime, which is that he was in his He lived in New
• 32:15
  Rochelle, I think he still does. New Rochelle, which is in Westchester
• 32:19
  County. It's a suburb of New York City. And he lives in a
• 32:22
  home, kind of a early twenty century home. And he was just stuck.
• 32:31
  He was in his writing room and he just didn't know what to write
• 32:35
  about. And he was in deep, deep dark depression and despair, the
• 32:39
  way writers get. And he finally just wandered around his study and could think
• 32:45
  of nothing to write about. Say, he put his head against the wall.
• 32:49
  He started to like bang his head literally bang his head against the wall.
• 32:54
  And finally he decided, well, the hell with it, He's just
• 32:57
  going to write about the wall. And he thought about the wall that he
• 33:00
  was, you know, pushing his forehead up against, and when it went
• 33:05
  up, and when the house was built, and that happened to be around,
• 33:07
  you know, in the period that Ragtime is built, and what was
• 33:08
  going on in New Rochelle at that time, and there was a parade and
• 33:12
  this one fraternal order of something and ratherand and suddenly out of out of banging
• 33:17
  his head against the wall and ran about comes Ragtime, which is a gigantic
• 33:22
  number one you New York Times bestseller uh and a sensationally successful film directed by
• 33:28
  Millish Foreman. Uh. And all of this came back by you know,
• 33:30
  banging his head against the wall. So so again the you you were asking
• 33:38
  about, oh, yes, about getting started. There's a writer. Do
• 33:40
  you know the name Anne LaMotte, Yeah, Annie Lamotch. He's best known.
• 33:45
  She's a wonderful novelist, but she's probably best known for the books she's
• 33:49
  written about writing. The best known is called Bird by Bird and she Annie
• 33:55
  preaches that every writer should allow themselves, which she calls a shitty first draft.
• 34:04
  You got to get it down on the page and stop, you know,
• 34:07
  being disappointed that it's not genius. Yet. There's another book I think
• 34:13
  is very interesting. It wasn't written about writing. About thirty years ago,
• 34:20
  there was a best seller by a writer named Mark McCormick. Mark McCormick actually
• 34:25
  was a sports He invented modern day sports management. He really started in golf
• 34:31
  and he's the guy who you know, got multimillion dollar contracts for ball players
• 34:37
  and really went along way towards getting rights for ball players at they you know,
• 34:42
  used to not have I remember, almost a half a century ago,
• 34:45
  I was working on a Jerry Lewis picture. I was the dialogue director on
• 34:50
  a Jerry Lewis picture of Warner Brothers, and on the Jerry liked to slum
• 34:53
  with ball players, and so he had the star of the Dodgers at that
• 34:55
  time, Willie Davis, on the movie. And Willie was a hold out
• 35:01
  that winter. You know, it was pre free agency. I don't know
• 35:07
  what you could do is refuse to play. So he had held out for
• 35:08
  this contraent front. Driving over the studio one day we were shooting in December.
• 35:13
  In January, you know, off season for baseball, I heard on
• 35:16
  the radio that Willie had signed his contract. So I asked him when I
• 35:20
  got to the studio. I had no right to ask him, but I
• 35:22
  asked him how much? So what do you think he got for the nineteen
• 35:25
  seventy season. He was twenty nine years old, he had hit almost four
• 35:30
  hundred the previous season. He was in his prime. He was one of
• 35:34
  the best players in baseball. What do you think was his salary for the
• 35:37
  nineteen seventy season. Take a guess. I'm going to take a guess.
• 35:42
  At thirty thousand for the year. That's a really good guess. It was
• 35:46
  not as bad as that. It was actually fifty thousand. People will guess,
• 35:51
  oh, you know, quarter of a million, a half a million,
• 35:52
  you know, million dollars and so on. Why do I mention this?
• 35:55
  I had to do with Oh yeah, Mark McCormick writing about sports management.
• 36:00
  He wrote a book called He went to the Harvard Business School and he
• 36:02
  wrote a book called What they Don't Teach You in the Harvard Business School.
• 36:07
  And it was kind of a street savvy, you know, wisdom for MBAs
• 36:13
  and CEOs, you know, and cefos and CEOs and CEOs and whatever,
• 36:20
  you know, major executives. And we was saying. One of his rules
• 36:24
  is it's quite wonderful, uh, I believe, And it works very well
• 36:31
  for people in the arts and including writers, and here it is, don't
• 36:36
  let excellent stand in the way of good. He got something that sort of
• 36:40
  works. Go with it, you know, at least for the time being,
• 36:45
  and then you'll come back and rewrite. But I think that's what slows
• 36:50
  people down sometimes they and stops them cold, you know, is it's not
• 36:55
  excellent every inch of the way as they go. It's merely good, and
• 37:00
  I'm saying, if you can be nearly good, thanks to God and move
• 37:06
  on. You mentioned Bird by Bird. It's funny you mentioned that because I
• 37:12
  was actually talking to people about, you know, books on writing and I
• 37:15
  and you know, usually the book if we just talked about writing as a
• 37:19
  whole. The number one book I always hear about is Stephen King's on writing.
• 37:22
  That is my favorite book by Stephen. It's a brilliant book. And
• 37:27
  by the way, you'll recall what he has to say about ideas. He
• 37:30
  launched his whole career with Carrie. That was his big success, his breakthrough.
• 37:37
  And by the way, you may remember from the book that he'd gotten
• 37:42
  some distance into it and then he despaired of it and he threw it away
• 37:45
  and Tabitha, his wife, Tabitha King, found it in the garbage and
• 37:51
  took it out and read it, said what's this? And she said,
• 37:53
  what's this? Friend of the Gum And she said, ah, it's just
• 37:55
  now we're going to have them in the band name. She said, well,
• 37:58
  you mean, it's just great. You should keep going. And that's
• 38:00
  how Carrie came about. But do you remember how it started. Stephen was
• 38:07
  living in Maine, where he still lives. And he was a high school
• 38:10
  teacher, and he always wondered what he knew what the boys room and the
• 38:15
  boys lockers looked like, but he was curious what the girls bathrooms and the
• 38:21
  girls lockers looked like. So one day when the after school hours, when
• 38:27
  when school was closed, but some of the teachers were still there and the
• 38:30
  lockers in the bathrooms were deserted, he went into the women's you know,
• 38:36
  the girls bathroom and the girls the lockers, and he discovered, guess what,
• 38:39
  they just exactly like the boys lockers, except for two differences. One
• 38:44
  is that in the showers, the boys lockers had gang showers, you know,
• 38:51
  just a great big room with nozzls you know, on the wall,
• 38:54
  and the girls had curtains. They had, you know, modesty curtains.
• 38:59
  They were there were tracks on the ceiling of the shower room and that provided
• 39:06
  for curtains so that they had, you know, a more modest experience when
• 39:10
  they showered. The other difference was that in the girls locker rooms and meth
• 39:16
  rooms there were these little vending machines, if you know what I mean.
• 39:22
  And look at Carrie. It's all about this girl who comes into menstruation and
• 39:29
  doesn't know what it is, is mocked and ridiculed by the other girls who
• 39:34
  see her in the shower, and they can see blood running under the curtain.
• 39:37
  If you saw the movie, if you remembered, or if you read
• 39:38
  the book, just looking in the locker room leads to a thing which he
• 39:43
  sold back then, forty years ago for four hundred thousand dollars, adjusted for
• 39:49
  inflation, would be about three million dollars today. And it all came about
• 39:52
  from curtains and tampons. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 40:04
  and now back to the show. Amazing, amazing. Yeah, I
• 40:10
  remember the opening of that movie, and it did heavily involve that. And
• 40:14
  you know, and you know, even the remake, which I remember pieces
• 40:19
  of I don't remember as much as the original, but uh, you know
• 40:22
  that had I think that's a similar, a similar beginning, similar open.
• 40:25
  Yeah. Well, I don't see the remake, but I remember Sassy Spacic
• 40:29
  in the beginning. She's very beginning of the hour. She's you know the
• 40:32
  movie, She's in the shower at school and there were other girls in the
• 40:37
  showers, and suddenly blood is running and she clearly does not know what this
• 40:42
  is about. He's never been taught by her parents or anybody else about menstruation.
• 40:45
  And she thinks there's something horribly wrong with her, that you know,
• 40:49
  she's evil, and and and then the other girls, uh see the blood
• 40:53
  and they see that she's upset about it, and you know, there's this
• 40:57
  terrible bullying uh attitude that emerges among adolescents, men and women, and they
• 41:05
  start to attack her. And so I mean, that's what drives the whole
• 41:08
  movie in this movie about revenge, isn't it. And she ultimately, you
• 41:13
  know, avenges them at the end of the movie. But it all derives
• 41:17
  from from that very very simple premise. And if you describe that to somebody
• 41:22
  superficially, they would think it's pretty hopeless. So again, I think that
• 41:25
  one of the biggest mistakes that writers make is to assign too much value,
• 41:32
  too much credit to the idea. I like to tell writers when you have
• 41:37
  a great idea, if you have a really great idea for a movie,
• 41:42
  that's all you got. I mean, what remains after that the you know,
• 41:49
  the incidents, the anecdotes, the events, the characters, the dialogues
• 41:53
  that describe I mean everything remains After that, the idea is really rather useless.
• 42:00
  What has value is the story. And think about it. You can
• 42:02
  tell the idea for a movie in a you know, a minute is about
• 42:07
  forty seconds more than you need to tell an idea, But to tell the
• 42:12
  story takes you, you know, as long as the movie. For example,
• 42:15
  I was talking. I was saying to somebody the other day what I
• 42:16
  had just said to you a little while ago about talking about the King's speech.
• 42:21
  I was describing, as I did to you, man man stutters,
• 42:25
  he has to give a speech. He how's a speech therapist and gives a
• 42:28
  speech. So somebody said, yeah, well you left out that the man
• 42:32
  who stutters is the King of England. And then it's the nineteen thirties and
• 42:37
  war clouds are gathering in, you know, on the continent, and that
• 42:40
  he's having a romance with Wallace Simpson, you know, an American commoner,
• 42:46
  and so on and sofa. Well, that's the story. That isn't that
• 42:52
  the story. That's not the idea any longer. It's the story, and
• 42:54
  that's where the value is. Yeah, you know, somebody wants told me
• 43:00
  that, you know, ideas are a dime a dozen but at that at
• 43:05
  that point, you're overpaying for the idea. It's yeah, well, I'll
• 43:07
  tell you something. I have a sideline I have. You know I am.
• 43:13
  If you ask me what I do, I would I am a writer,
• 43:15
  if you know, if I were an elevator and time to respond,
• 43:20
  you know. But the truth is, I also am an educator, pretty
• 43:24
  well known educator. But that's not the end of it. That's just the
• 43:28
  beginning. But I'm also a consultant and I consult in you don't know,
• 43:32
  a public speaker, and I'm a media commentator. I do a lot of
• 43:37
  appearances on talk shows, television, radio, and as a consultant, I
• 43:45
  do two kinds of consulting. One is I've already told you about where I
• 43:49
  work with writers. I consult with writers as a script doctor. I give
• 43:52
  them support in working out there their scripts. And the other kind of consult
• 44:00
  things that I do is in the court. I am a court authorized expert
• 44:05
  in intellectual property law, particularly copyright infringement in plasiarism. Who wrote the movie
• 44:10
  and I have testified. I've been an expert witness in oh between thirty and
• 44:16
  forty court cases over the years where there's litigation over you know who wrote the
• 44:23
  movie. Somebody thinks the movie was stolen from them. And over the years,
• 44:27
  I've on occasion been retained as a witness by plaintiffs but also by defendants.
• 44:32
  I was a witness, for example, in the very legendary case at
• 44:37
  Paramount involving Art Buckwalt, the famous humorist and the Paramount the producer of the
• 44:44
  movie Coming to America and Eddie Movie, Eddie Murphy movie and Eddie Movie Murphy,
• 44:52
  where buck Walt suit claiming they'd stolen it from him and so on.
• 44:55
  I testified that the you know, they didn't steal the from him, that
• 45:00
  it was a different movie. But I only mentioned it because it is the
• 45:06
  miss appropriation of value regarding ideas that has if I could put it this way,
• 45:13
  put orfodanche on my children's teeth and paid for their fancy ass nose bleed
• 45:17
  costly private school education. My wife and I looked a lot of kids have
• 45:24
  grown up now, God blessing, But we used to joke that we saved
• 45:28
  up enough money to send our kids to college, but we spent it all
• 45:30
  on high school. You know. And what I mean by one of that
• 45:35
  is people attach too much value to the idea. They had an idea for
• 45:42
  a movie, they see another movie that has a similar idea, and they
• 45:45
  think it must have been stolen from them, when they don't get that it's
• 45:51
  just an idea. Ideas are not protectable. It's the expression of the idea
• 45:57
  over the length and breadth of a narrative, where the where the value is.
• 46:00
  You know, you have to show what the courts called substantial and ideally
• 46:06
  strikingly similar examples from one to the other, you know, not just that
• 46:13
  the boy and a girl fall in love, they break up, and then
• 46:15
  they get back together again. You know. So so this misunderstanding of ideas
• 46:19
  has put a lot of money in my pocket. You know. It's it's
• 46:22
  you know, funny you mentioned that because about maybe two summers ago, I
• 46:27
  actually met a professor who teaches at Yale and he actually also does you know,
• 46:34
  uh does copyright and things like that, and he was actually involved in
• 46:37
  the Avatar case because some some writers came and said James Cameron stole their idea
• 46:42
  for Avatar, and they wanted to you know, they wanted a you know,
• 46:45
  a couple of millions, actually, you know, more than a couple
• 46:46
  of million. Dollars. But uh, and he was involved in that whole
• 46:50
  litigation. Interesting, I don't mind bragging that it's a student of ours and
• 46:54
  named Leita Kinda gritas very successful writer. She wrote much of Avatar. Jim
• 47:04
  gives her credit, not as writer, but she does have a producer credit
• 47:07
  and it's her own card. Her name stands all alone on the screen.
• 47:14
  But the fact of the matter is she really wrote a lot of that movie.
• 47:15
  She's not suing her complaining, You understand, she idolizes Jim Cameron,
• 47:20
  and I think he's I know him too. He's been very good to us
• 47:22
  and our students in our program. And uh, you know, Leda was
• 47:30
  paid millions and millions of dollars for her work on Avatar. And she's she's
• 47:35
  not not complaining. But yeah, I believe that any any big movie.
• 47:39
  You know, a lot of people know about the the buck Wald case.
• 47:44
  It was covered, you know, the Coming to America case that I mentioned
• 47:47
  earlier. It was covered Gavel to Gavel. It was held live Gabble to
• 47:52
  Gavel on the trial on CNN. I remember, And a lot of people
• 47:58
  don't know that there that particular litigation was one among seven or eight cases where
• 48:05
  people had claimed, you know, other people had claimed they'd written the movie,
• 48:07
  you know, independently. There's an expression that every success has many parents,
• 48:16
  but failure is an orphan. In other words, if a movie makes
• 48:21
  no money, nobody hears about it, no one will sue. But if
• 48:22
  you have a great, big hit like Avatar, there's going to be bunches
• 48:27
  of lawsuits. I know that my old classmate, George Lucas from usc film
• 48:30
  school. We were film school students together all those years ago. You know,
• 48:37
  there have been multiple suits. Star Wars was sold from him, you
• 48:39
  know, from them. I I remember that he went up to Canada to
• 48:45
  it would have been easier for him to just settle, which is what they
• 48:49
  usually do. But he's a very funky, feisty guy, George, and
• 48:52
  nobody's going to say that. You know, he's not going to going to
• 48:55
  consent to anybody. Uh you know, Uh, he's never going to agree
• 49:00
  in any that he ever ripped anybody off. And so he actually went to
• 49:06
  the trial and somebody had uh claimed that he the plaintiff, had had invented
• 49:13
  the whookie and George has stolen that from him, you know, So you
• 49:17
  know, suck when my son was little, if he couldn't find his baseball,
• 49:21
  maybe he'd say, who stole my glove? You know, it couldn't
• 49:22
  be that he misplaced it, you know what. You know what I'm saying.
• 49:27
  So people always think that there's something similar. It must have been stolen
• 49:30
  from from them. Uh. Occasionally it happens, but it's most exceptional.
• 49:35
  And when you mistake the exception for the rule, ya fall on your face
• 49:37
  every time. Very true. Uh, you know. And and the more
• 49:42
  I hear about, you know, cases like that, you know, Richard,
• 49:45
  And the more I hear that it is either you know, a hey,
• 49:47
  you know what, two people, you know, great minds think alike,
• 49:50
  as they say, So you know, it is possible if you know
• 49:52
  two people that living, you know, maybe the opposite ends of the earth
• 49:55
  came up with a similar idea. You know. We'll be right back after
• 50:00
  a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. I mean,
• 50:10
  I mean, you know, you and I could go to the video
• 50:12
  store. You know, well, if their video stores are still around,
• 50:14
  you and I could go to Netflix and we could see there are there's all
• 50:16
  there's a plethora of movies that maybe share maybe the same scene or maybe share
• 50:22
  like the same you know, plot points, or maybe share the same you
• 50:25
  know character character attributes something similars on those lines. Again, the only thing
• 50:31
  I totally I totally agree theme many movies of the same theme Jaws, I
• 50:38
  happen to know. And now I'm blanket card Nottley who who wrote Jaws,
• 50:45
  of course he was adapting to Peter Benchley book. Was was telling me that
• 50:52
  the h you know, he had conversations with Bentley. Jaws is based on
• 50:58
  a play by the great Norwegian player at Enrick Ibsen, and the play is
• 51:07
  called an Enemy of the People. It's a very well known, you know,
• 51:08
  sort of a classic play. I guess it's a one hundred and fifty
• 51:13
  years old or something. And it's set in a health resort, health spa
• 51:20
  that's famous for its waters, that there are healing water as people come from
• 51:24
  you know, a thousand miles you know, to have their their maladies healed
• 51:30
  in the waters, the magical waters of this particular health spa. And the
• 51:37
  protagonist in the movie is doctor Stockman. He's the medical director of the baths.
• 51:44
  Now this doesn't sound at all like Jaws, but consider this, at
• 51:47
  the beginning of the movie, he discovers, the doctor does that the waters
• 51:51
  are actually polluted and that they're making people ill. And this is a really
• 51:57
  important discovery. When he announced, is it, he thinks people will honor
• 52:01
  him because he's saving a lot of people a lot of illness and even death,
• 52:07
  you know, because they'll stay out of that bad water. And it
• 52:09
  will also get the resort to do whatever needs to do if it can be
• 52:14
  done to you know, repair that right. So that doesn't sound terribly like
• 52:19
  Joe's, and yet it is because the reaction of the of the health spa
• 52:23
  and the community around it that lives off the income brought in from tourists coming
• 52:28
  into be guests at the spa, they instead of honoring him, they they
• 52:35
  you know, degrade him, They deride him, and they declare him an
• 52:37
  enemy of the people. And that's exactly the deal with Richard dreyfuss In as
• 52:44
  the sheriff and Jaws and John's if you remember that he realizes it's the start
• 52:49
  of the season, it's a beach town and suddenly there's a dangerous shark.
• 52:53
  Uh And if word gets out that there's all of that danger and people aren't
• 52:59
  supposed to use the each well, they're not gonna do a beach vacation,
• 53:01
  at least not there, you know. So instead of honoring him for making
• 53:06
  this really important life saving discovery, they degrade him, they humiliate him,
• 53:12
  they scorn him, they mock him, they loathe him. And so the
• 53:15
  theme is history hates a truth teller, something like that. And that's the
• 53:22
  same theme for Jaws and for the Enemy of the People, even though they
• 53:28
  so what's the difference between them. The difference is the story totally different story,
• 53:32
  the setting, the dialogue, the characters, everything is different, though
• 53:37
  they have the same theme. Quite quite true. So you're going to see
• 53:42
  movies that have similar themes. But you can't protect a theme. All you
• 53:45
  can protect this a story, and it has to be substantive. This happens,
• 53:50
  that happens, this happens, that happens, the same stuff happens in
• 53:53
  both. And then you're starting to get onto a uh, you know,
• 53:59
  and enterprise that is protectable. It's just a very, very crazy arena.
• 54:09
  The truth of the matter is studios, producers, production companies, networks,
• 54:15
  cable companies. They have no selfish interest in stealing material. They don't want
• 54:21
  to risk the tens of millions of dollars that it takes to put together a
• 54:25
  series or a movie. Indeed, Avador have a billion dollars. Nobody's going
• 54:36
  to make that kind of investment and try to cut somebody out of one tenth
• 54:39
  of one percent of that, which would be you know, hundreds and hundreds
• 54:43
  of thousands of dollars or even millions of dollars for the script, and put
• 54:47
  the whole rest of the project into jeopardy just trying to shave off a point
• 54:52
  or even two from the budget by stealing the script. You follow what I'm
• 54:55
  saying, Oh, yeah, it just you know, there's a ah,
• 55:00
  I'm not a lawyer, though I've spent a lot of time around lawyers doing
• 55:05
  this kind of kind of working. There's a there's a Latin phrase, I
• 55:09
  forget what it is, something like queen bone. Oh, you know who
• 55:13
  benefits from this? If you look at a legal case and you want to
• 55:17
  say, well, who's in you know, you suddenly discover for somebody dies
• 55:21
  and you suddenly discover that they had a huge insurance policy and it all goes
• 55:25
  to this particular beneficiary. Well, that beneficiary had a substantial steak and a
• 55:30
  great reward in this person dying, maybe maybe she or he killed him.
• 55:35
  Right, So movie companies have a steak in not stealing material. Nobody benefits
• 55:45
  by that, and indeed they suffered greatly. So I think it does happen,
• 55:51
  but I believe it's vastly, vastly exaggerated. You know, you mentioned
• 55:57
  you know your classmate was George Lucas. Do you have any other, you
• 56:00
  know, interesting stories or any other funny stories about you and George. Well,
• 56:05
  you know, I am the uncredited writer of the first two drafts of
• 56:08
  American Graffiti. There's no controversy about it. George doesn't tell it any differently.
• 56:16
  There's nothing unusual in Hollywood about a substantial number of writers being paid for
• 56:23
  their services on a particular picture and not all of them getting credit credit as
• 56:29
  a a judgment that is rendered by the writers Guild. So I yeah,
• 56:36
  I worked there. I knew George pretty well. We weren't very close friends
• 56:38
  in film school, but we knew each other, and we were at parties
• 56:43
  together, we were in classes together. I was in awe of his achievements
• 56:46
  as a film student, as we all are back then at USC. His
• 56:52
  legendary student film THHX one eight four eb which became a feature length film,
• 56:59
  ultimately not as good as the shorter version, but it was his first movie.
• 57:04
  It was done at Warner Brothers with Francis Ford Coppola producing. I was
• 57:10
  this, you know, in awe of his talent as a graphic artist as
• 57:15
  a filmmaker when I was in film school. When we worked together on Graffiti,
• 57:20
  I didn't really work closely with him. He had he was out of
• 57:24
  the country, actually had the long version of sex we called it sex THHX.
• 57:34
  He was bringing that to Can the festival. I was traveling with his
• 57:37
  then wife Marcia. They were backpacking around Europe and they were going to end
• 57:40
  up at can and they needed a draft of Graffiti in a hurry, and
• 57:46
  I was asked to write it in a couple of weeks, which I did
• 57:51
  on that first draft, and it did not He was not pleased with it.
• 57:57
  For he complimented it for it and he had over the years complimented for
• 58:01
  its professionalism and all of that. But he was bothered by two aspects of
• 58:07
  it. One was the sex in it. You know, I saw it
• 58:09
  as a tale of you know, adolescents coming of age and all of that,
• 58:15
  and that's a time of sexual awakening. And you know, if you
• 58:17
  look at George's films that kind of like clinical surrand rapped. As far as
• 58:22
  sexuality is concerned, there's sort of isn't any you know, the h and
• 58:29
  I'm a sexual pervert, not really a kidding, but but I think that,
• 58:35
  you know, in my own I've written at length about adolescent My first
• 58:37
  novel was a coming of age in New York City, and there's a lot
• 58:43
  of you know, sexuality in its young people flirting and and and more.
• 58:49
  And George didn't like that. He's kind of uptight about those sorts of things.
• 58:52
  And the other thing you didn't like was that it wasn't close enough his
• 58:54
  own experience, you know, growing up in the desk. So hey,
• 58:58
  I'm you know, I'm a New York kid. I'm up in the Queen's
• 59:00
  and went to school, went high school in Manhattan, you know, and
• 59:02
  I didn't know any of about cars and stuff like that. So we never
• 59:07
  really worked together on and except after the first draft. It was a two
• 59:10
  draft deal we did. We didn't meet at my house and then we met.
• 59:16
  I remember we had another meeting at a restaurant in Hollywood, and we
• 59:21
  spoke at length on the phone after the you know, during the process of
• 59:24
  writing the second draft and and so on. I was well paid for the
• 59:30
  work that I did, and I'm not complaining. You know, again,
• 59:35
  the credit decision is something that is rendered by the writer's guild and uh,
• 59:42
  the so it's really their judgment, not the studio's judgment, not George's judgment,
• 59:46
  and so on. He's a powerhouse. You know, he's a kind
• 59:52
  of a rough, nerdy, scratchy voice, little guy. But I mean
• 59:58
  he's suggested great genius I've ever known. We'll be right back after a word
• 1:00:04
  from our sponsor, and now back to the show. I mean, the
• 1:00:12
  impact of that his work has had across I mean, who on the world,
• 1:00:16
  you know, who around the world doesn't know some aspect of the of
• 1:00:20
  the Star Wars franchise hasn't been touched by some aspect of it, right,
• 1:00:24
  I mean, you know, don't you think it's realistic to suggest that billions
• 1:00:28
  of people have heard of it? At least? Who do you know in
• 1:00:30
  all of human history who touched so many people, got into the consciousness and
• 1:00:35
  the awareness of so many people all around across the globe in so little time.
• 1:00:42
  As George did. I also believe that the influence that he's had the
• 1:00:45
  influence of Star Wars. I'm not really crazy about the movies. John Neaius
• 1:00:50
  our film school. Look An, you know, a fellow alumnus, alumnus
• 1:00:58
  you know, calls them pap. I watch all of them. I've seen
• 1:01:02
  the first one, which is I guess the fourth one by a certain measurement,
• 1:01:07
  part of the second one, and so on. But the lesson that
• 1:01:10
  they put out there, I think is a really really affirmative, healing,
• 1:01:16
  positive message across the world, a very Judeo Christian message, which is that
• 1:01:23
  the power of love is greater than the power of hate, the power of
• 1:01:28
  God is stronger than the power of Satan, the power of construction is bigger
• 1:01:34
  than the power of destruction. I mean, you know, you have a
• 1:01:37
  fairy tale. And again again going back to the ideas we were talking before,
• 1:01:40
  what's the idea behind Star Wars. I'll tell you what it is,
• 1:01:45
  and you already know what it is. It's a fairy tale in space.
• 1:01:50
  The bad guys abduct the princess and you know, the good guys rescue her.
• 1:01:54
  That's Star Wars, isn't it. Yeah, That's what makes I was
• 1:02:00
  special in the answer is the frame by frame, moment by moment scene by
• 1:02:04
  seeing action in it, and the dialogue that the characters speak and and so
• 1:02:10
  on. So, you know, George is a very h you know,
• 1:02:16
  he's not a very available kind of a guy. I don't think a lot
• 1:02:20
  of it. People would describe him as warm and cuddly. But when I
• 1:02:29
  worked with him, both on campus and off campus, that was certainly a
• 1:02:34
  professional arrangement and agreement. And you know, whatever disagreements that that were had
• 1:02:39
  were you know, we're experienced, were not unusual among artists working on a
• 1:02:46
  movie together. Yeah, very It's very understandable. And I was actually his
• 1:02:52
  house guest. I remember my wife and I in the August of nineteen sixty
• 1:02:57
  nine. He had already left LA he was living up in marin And I'd
• 1:03:04
  love to say that my class at USC we were the first to move on.
• 1:03:07
  You know, when we came to film school, there was no tradition
• 1:03:09
  of moving from film school into the professional community. In fact, I have
• 1:03:13
  an article right now it's just come out like yesterday or the day before,
• 1:03:17
  in the current issue, the most recent issue which has just come out excuse
• 1:03:23
  me of written by which is the Writer's Guild monthly journal, and it's called
• 1:03:30
  film school haven or hoax, and I'm arguing that, you know in it.
• 1:03:35
  I'm arguing, of course, I have a vested interest in it,
• 1:03:37
  but I still believe it's observably, verifiably empirically true. The film schools not
• 1:03:42
  a hoax, you know, but very very helpful in in getting you know,
• 1:03:49
  people into the movie business. I cite in the article eleven eleven titles
• 1:03:54
  of movies written, I'm sorry, directed or produce and or produced by Steven
• 1:04:00
  Spielberg that were written by at least in part by UCLA trained writers who have
• 1:04:05
  on screen credits for those movies. Eleven of them. Jurassic Park won too,
• 1:04:10
  three, Indiana Jones two and three. That's five right there, the
• 1:04:15
  terminal Munich Lincoln, War of the World's Eagle Eye. Eagle Eye was produced
• 1:04:23
  by Stephen Travis. Wright was the writer our student a few years ago when
• 1:04:28
  am I leaving out, oh the TV series Amazing Stories. Our students in
• 1:04:34
  the last six or seven years of at five just in the last six or
• 1:04:39
  seven years, five Academy Award Best Screenplay nominations and have won three Oscars for
• 1:04:46
  Best Screenplay in the last so script between now and then now being today and
• 1:04:53
  then being with time now almost half century ago that I was going to film
• 1:04:57
  school in classes with George Lucas. The big diff prances that film school has
• 1:05:01
  gone from being a dead end professionally to being the single most advantageous way to
• 1:05:10
  enter the film industry. So I like to say that our class at USC
• 1:05:15
  we were the first ones to go on to own Hollywood, except for Georgia
• 1:05:19
  Olms Marin County. So in any event, my wife and I in nineteen
• 1:05:25
  sixty nine, in August, we took a motor trip, just a vacation,
• 1:05:30
  a holiday up the West coast, and we drove all the way up
• 1:05:32
  ultimately to the Oregon border, the California Argon border, the quad Dunes.
• 1:05:39
  There are some beautiful sand dunes along the northern California southern Oregon coast, just
• 1:05:47
  exquisite. We camped along Brenson but on the way we stopped at San Francisco,
• 1:05:51
  and I remember I had we had brunch one Sunday morning in Sauce Elite
• 1:06:00
  with some old film schools pals, including George and Marsha. Also John Nelius,
• 1:06:06
  if you know that name, I referred to him earlier. John,
• 1:06:10
  you know, invented Schwarzenegger. You know, he did con Conan and bunches
• 1:06:15
  of other movies he wrote. John probably best known for his script of Apocalypse.
• 1:06:19
  Apocalypse now. So it was my wife and I and George and Marsha
• 1:06:25
  and Melius. Also Caleb Deschanel, who's probably famous now being the father of
• 1:06:30
  very famous actors daughters. But the Caleb is of course himself a multi nominated
• 1:06:36
  cinematography he's one of the most respected, the most successful cameraman in the history
• 1:06:43
  of the industry. And there were some other people. There was Walter Murch
• 1:06:47
  who's very famous. Walter actually won two Oscars for sound design and something else
• 1:06:53
  in the same years. In Officer one he got to come of twice to
• 1:06:58
  the stage to pick up as oscars. He was there with his wife Aggie,
• 1:07:02
  a British woman. And then was also Caleb, as I mentioned,
• 1:07:05
  and a producer now a well known producer, David Lester, who produced all
• 1:07:14
  around Shelton's films In a Bull Durham and on and on and on, and
• 1:07:17
  I remember Marsha invited us to to be there. Their house guests, and
• 1:07:25
  we said, well, we're moving on up the coast tonight, you know,
• 1:07:29
  I mean right after this meal, we're driving north. She said,
• 1:07:32
  but on the way down, if you want to stay with us, feel
• 1:07:34
  free. So we did. We were actually the house guests overnight when he
• 1:07:38
  was living in Mill Valley in Marina. Was before his gigantic success with Graffiti.
• 1:07:45
  Graffiti wouldn't come out yet for about three years. I think it was
• 1:07:48
  in seventy two seventy one or seventy two seventy three. It came out.
• 1:07:55
  It was released in seventy three. So we were all, you know,
• 1:08:00
  well, film school pals. When I look back, you know, at
• 1:08:02
  the time, we weren't really aware of it. You've got to look back
• 1:08:06
  to see it to talk about right place, right time. You know,
• 1:08:09
  I had come out. I thought to California for three weeks from New York,
• 1:08:15
  and at the last moment I just fell into film school. That sc
• 1:08:17
  kind of a whim and you know, somebody turned around. It was ten
• 1:08:23
  years later. You know, I had never really planned to settle in California.
• 1:08:30
  It's much less to become a screenwriter, much much much less to be
• 1:08:35
  a paniard professor you know, and legal expert and so on. If here
• 1:08:41
  has a great example of staying open to the surprise is in a life narrative.
• 1:08:45
  I think you know, I'm always sowing writers in your dramatic narrative,
• 1:08:48
  in your life narrative, stay open to the surprises that all of the people
• 1:08:53
  I know who are enjoying what they're doing are also surprised by what they're doing,
• 1:09:00
  doing what they planned to do. People who do what they planned to
• 1:09:03
  do are people. I know a lot of such people, and they offer
• 1:09:08
  the most what doctors. I grew up in New York City and the big
• 1:09:11
  thing to be was a doctor. So I know a lot of medical professionals,
• 1:09:15
  and they're very successful. They're you know, they're well paid and so
• 1:09:19
  on, but not all of Some of them are very happy, but not
• 1:09:21
  all of them. Many of them are unhappy. This one wishes he was
• 1:09:26
  an oceanographer. That one wishes he was an anthropologist, and all of them
• 1:09:30
  seem to wish they were also screenwriters. Sometimes it seems like. And the
• 1:09:35
  point is that you know, there's a Chinese curse me or dreams come true
• 1:09:42
  curse. It's a little scary when when you accomplish what you said out to
• 1:09:46
  accomplish, and it doesn't really feel right. I have a friend who's just
• 1:09:49
  retired from medicine. He's done very very well, he's respected, he's made
• 1:09:56
  a good living, but he's always been lukewarm at asked about about his career.
• 1:10:02
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back
• 1:10:10
  to the show. Never really enjoyed it. On the other hand, I
• 1:10:15
  know another doctor, a friend of mine who went to film who went to
• 1:10:18
  medical school but just didn't like practicing medicine. What he liked was computers,
• 1:10:24
  and very early in the computer revolution, he got into the the writing of
• 1:10:31
  software for computerizing pathology laps. He was a pathologist whose specialty was pathology,
• 1:10:40
  and that branched on out to general medical medical record keeping in general. They
• 1:10:47
  were computerizing all of that. You know, previously a doctor would see a
• 1:10:50
  symptom and would sort of think about it. Now you can, you know,
• 1:10:53
  really search the databases. And this is a result of not just inconvenience,
• 1:10:58
  but in the savings of countless lives if you think about it. So,
• 1:11:03
  my friend is we were visiting with him. He lives in Seattle.
• 1:11:11
  We were visiting with him and his wifele ar Old Pounds of laws some months
• 1:11:15
  ago. And his house is on Lake Washington. There's a duck behind it,
• 1:11:21
  and on one side of his power boat and on the other side of
• 1:11:25
  his sailboat across the lake, and a little to the south the Bill Gates
• 1:11:31
  compound. I mean, this guy has done real well, my friend,
• 1:11:34
  and he loves his work. And he didn't jettison his medical education. He
• 1:11:41
  very much exploited it. And that's not a dirty word. It just means
• 1:11:43
  make the most of it. He integrated into his career, his very successful
• 1:11:46
  career, a career that he loves that he just enjoys enormously. My point
• 1:11:54
  is he's not doing what he expected to do and he's loving it. And
• 1:12:00
  that's what I'm what. The point that I'm making is that it's possible to
• 1:12:04
  overplan, kind of outsmart yourself in life and else. And you mentioned Richard,
• 1:12:11
  you know sometimes it wants to be a screenwriter. You know, it's
• 1:12:15
  kind of like everyone. I think it was. Joe Esterhouse, the screenwriter
• 1:12:18
  of Basic Instinct, once said, uh, you know, it used to
• 1:12:21
  be if it wants to write the great American novel. Now it's the great
• 1:12:24
  American screenplay. Yeah. No, Joe is a friend of mine. I
• 1:12:30
  know him well over a number of number of years, and I'm aware aware
• 1:12:33
  that he said that it seems to be true. Uh, it seems to
• 1:12:40
  be true. People people want to Uh. You know, there are more
• 1:12:43
  people who years ago would have been writing novels than are writting screenplays. I
• 1:12:47
  do both. I've just finished the novel and I've had modest success in both
• 1:12:56
  areas. And it's interesting that guy was just lecturing on this this is my
• 1:12:59
  subject. A week ago at the pitch Fest, we were talking about how
• 1:13:04
  it's funny. Let me put it this way. There's a there's a political
• 1:13:10
  figure you've heard of, Governor Christie from New Jersey. He's running for president,
• 1:13:15
  and he was I saw him sometime last week. Earlier in the week,
• 1:13:20
  he was bitterly denying that he was what somebody had accused him of.
• 1:13:26
  Somebody had accused him and called him to characterized him as a particular word,
• 1:13:30
  a very very evil word, the most evil word that you can you know,
• 1:13:34
  used to characterize a political figure that these days in this country. Can
• 1:13:39
  you guess what the word was, I'll tell you. Somebody called him a
• 1:13:44
  moderate they said that he was moderate. Imagine that used to be like a
• 1:13:50
  compliment, you know, he was denying these a moderate. Now why do
• 1:13:56
  I bother you about that? Because there's a word in Hollywood that Hollywood seems
• 1:14:00
  to have come to hate. Are you ready? Original? They don't want
• 1:14:05
  to do anything original. In fact, the disappointing release of Tomorrowland is that
• 1:14:12
  what it's called Rowland? Yeah, with Clooney? What kind of disappointed?
• 1:14:17
  They say that they're not going to do any more original movies, you know,
• 1:14:20
  because if Tomorrowland is original movie, they only want to do tinfoles,
• 1:14:25
  remakes, reboots, prequels and sequels, adaptations of material from other media.
• 1:14:32
  They don't want to do original screenplays. And I think that's a real pity
• 1:14:36
  because, uh, you know, what they're trying to do is play it
• 1:14:42
  safe, and playing it safe is the most hazardous course you can follow in
• 1:14:46
  an arc. You have to take the risks, you have to embrace the
• 1:14:51
  risks. Invites, solicit and courage the risks, it seems to me.
• 1:14:58
  And nevertheless, it as if you're a writer and you have an original screenplay,
• 1:15:03
  what are you gonna do with that? Nobody's making original screenplays or certainly
• 1:15:05
  these studios are not. They are not buying spec scripts and turning them into
• 1:15:11
  movies. They're developing projects inside. I had a writer who wants to he's
• 1:15:15
  a huge fan of Batman, and he wanted the Batman franchise, and he
• 1:15:18
  wanted to pay me a substantial sum to give him notes on a Batman script.
• 1:15:24
  Day right, I said, but you can't do anything with a script
• 1:15:28
  Warner Brothers on the right, you know Batman, Because he said, well,
• 1:15:33
  I'll show what the Warner Brothers. But Warner Brothers isn't gonna look at
• 1:15:38
  a Batman's script. They're not going to buy it speculated Batman script. They're
• 1:15:43
  going to develop it with writers they know who work with producers. They know.
• 1:15:46
  Those writers may very well be former students of mind mind you, and
• 1:15:49
  I'm happy to brag about that. But they are not going to do this
• 1:15:53
  guy's script. Not only are they gonna make it, they aren't even gonna
• 1:15:56
  read it. And they're gonna make a point not to read it for a
• 1:15:59
  reason. To go back to what we were talking about earlier, having to
• 1:16:00
  do with litigation, If it's Batman, it's certainly going to be similar.
• 1:16:04
  It's going to have certain similarities to the doesn't Batman have franchise? Don't you
• 1:16:10
  think? And then they'll be they'll be their lawyers at Warner Brothers will be
• 1:16:13
  telling you you mustn't look at this and you must notify you must send this
• 1:16:16
  back to him and tell him we haven't looked at it. We don't accept
• 1:16:18
  the the symterial. And so because he's going to claim when the new Batman
• 1:16:21
  games out that we that we really used it, and we didn't, you
• 1:16:27
  know, uh, we just we stole it from so uh. So we're
• 1:16:33
  talking about originality. So how do you get around that as a writer?
• 1:16:38
  Uh? And the answer is, and I've had modest success with this repeatedly
• 1:16:42
  in my career. I don't consider myself to be any kind of superstar.
• 1:16:46
  But the uh, the Wall Street Journal calls me. They what did they
• 1:16:53
  say about me? They said, Oh, I am a writer of substantial
• 1:16:57
  professional experience. You know, there's no literary laundry I haven't taken. And
• 1:17:01
  I've written feature assignments, feature length movie assignments for all of the studios,
• 1:17:08
  almost every studio, and I've told material to all three major broadcast networks.
• 1:17:15
  And I have had almost half a dozen books published by by all of them
• 1:17:18
  by major New York publishers. I've had best sellers in non fiction, my
• 1:17:25
  screenwriting books in print, you know, over thirty years. My last novel
• 1:17:31
  made the Times List best seller lists only for a week and only at number
• 1:17:36
  thirteen. But think you know the Times List. It's not a small thing.
• 1:17:41
  And the reason I mentioned it to you is that my very first novel
• 1:17:47
  I had written as a screenplay and I just couldn't. It's been said Hollywood
• 1:17:56
  is the one place on earth where you could die of encouragement. I had
• 1:17:59
  some encouragement over that script when I never had was a nickel for it.
• 1:18:03
  And finally there was a strike and you couldn't market to Hollywood anyway, And
• 1:18:09
  so naively I turned it into I used it as an outline for a novel,
• 1:18:12
  and I wrote a novel. I was naive about how cruel the fiction
• 1:18:15
  market is, especially the first fiction market, and that naive pay served me
• 1:18:19
  very well because I sold a thing right away. And you know, had
• 1:18:24
  I been more stavvy about the business, maybe I wouldn't have you invested the
• 1:18:30
  time and effort it would take to turn down into a novel. Knowing how
• 1:18:32
  grim the chances were. So you understand how ignorance is your friend, naive
• 1:18:38
  pay is your pal. Now, as soon as it was sold as a
• 1:18:43
  novel, it was sold as a movie. A Warner Brothers, a studio
• 1:18:48
  that had turned it down when it was a screenplay, bought the same screenplay
• 1:18:51
  as soon as it had been published as a novel because it was no longer
• 1:18:55
  original, it was now an adaptation. It had been tested in another market.
• 1:19:00
  The executives. If every every day in Hollywood that an executive doesn't have
• 1:19:04
  to make a decision about anything as a victory for her. She hasn't put
• 1:19:10
  her neck out, she hasn't risked and he you know, if you don't
• 1:19:13
  do anything, you'll never do anything wrong. Right. So, and every
• 1:19:17
  movie that does get made starts with the anticipation by the executives who are responsible
• 1:19:23
  for spending the money to produce it. It starts with their expectation that it
• 1:19:28
  will fail. And they're trying to figure out how to explain away the anticipated
• 1:19:32
  failure of the movie. I don't see how that can do anything other than
• 1:19:36
  to suppress creativity and imagination and so on. But you understand how somebody could
• 1:19:43
  say if the movie comes out and it bombs, for example, Bonfire the
• 1:19:48
  Vanities, which is reduced by a friend of mine and a colleague of mine.
• 1:19:53
  He's also a professor at UCLA. Peter Goober very successful producer. He
• 1:19:57
  was We'll be right back award from our sponsor and now back to the show.
• 1:20:06
  Had a Warner Brothers. He was at a Columbia. He's produced a
• 1:20:10
  lot of major, major movies. Well, one of the movies that he
• 1:20:14
  produced, it was a Terrible mom there's even a book written about about it
• 1:20:19
  was Bonfire the Vanities. And when people say to him, Peter, how
• 1:20:25
  could you invest so much money in this turkey? He can. I mean,
• 1:20:30
  you must be some lousy executive. We should get rid of you.
• 1:20:31
  He has a defense, and the defense is, wait a minute. This
• 1:20:35
  was a best selling novel by Tom Wolfe. I also had Bruce Willis and
• 1:20:42
  Tom Hanks in the movie. The screenplay was adapted by Michael Christopher, a
• 1:20:48
  very very distinguished, respected writer. The director was Brian the Pond. It's
• 1:20:54
  not my fault. It's not my fault. You understand what I'm saying.
• 1:20:56
  So suddenly, because with my own novel when it was sold as a movie,
• 1:21:01
  the producer who bought it could say, if anybody asked him, how
• 1:21:04
  I think you'd buy this? Because say, what, don't mean Mortar Books
• 1:21:08
  published this? You know, major publisher New York published this. So I'm
• 1:21:12
  not the only one crazy enough to think that there's merit in this. So
• 1:21:15
  I've been recommending to writers that they contemplate me write a screenplay, but instead
• 1:21:21
  of showing the screenplay, write an original screenplay. Certainly you don't want to
• 1:21:27
  do an adaptation of material that you don't own. I mean, they're lie
• 1:21:34
  dragons. What are you gonna do with something if you don't have the underlying
• 1:21:38
  rights. So what I'm recommending is they write an original screenplay, but then
• 1:21:44
  instead of marketing the screenplay at first, they use it as an elaborate outline
• 1:21:49
  for their novel and write it as a novel, and then try to sell
• 1:21:54
  the work as a novel, and once it sold as a novel, they
• 1:21:59
  can get action as a screenplay. I've done that multiple times now, and
• 1:22:02
  right now I'm working on I've just finished a novel that's based on a screenplay.
• 1:22:08
  I wrote the screen the last summer, and now I'm finished the draft
• 1:22:12
  of the novel. It's just the draft. I still have to do a
• 1:22:14
  bunch of work on it. But once you've got the screenplay, most of
• 1:22:16
  the heavy lifting has been done. I regard it just like we were talking
• 1:22:20
  earlier about the most valuable part of the equation is the story. Once you've
• 1:22:26
  got the story will work. Now you've got the characters, the dialogue.
• 1:22:30
  I mean, most of that's there in the screenplay, isn't it. To
• 1:22:32
  turn that into a novel is relatively easy? Underscore relatives, you know,
• 1:22:40
  relatively there's not a you know, no writing is easy. But for me,
• 1:22:45
  the hardest part of writing is the heavy lifting. Isn't in devising creating
• 1:22:49
  the plot, because the plot, the story really involves everybody else. The
• 1:22:54
  story is character, story is dialogue, story is description, It's every thing.
• 1:23:00
  I mean, who's the richest character? I mean, imagine somebody said,
• 1:23:03
  well we're in a minute, richie, what about character? Isn't that
• 1:23:05
  important? But who's the greatest character in all of English language dramatic literature?
• 1:23:11
  Isn't it a Hamlet? Certainly Hamlet would be a good candidate, don't you
• 1:23:16
  think? So? What's the description? Have you ever read Hamlet? Do
• 1:23:24
  you remember the playwrights description of Hamlet here it is, it's three words prints
• 1:23:30
  of Denmark. That's it. There's nothing about melancholy. So where does this
• 1:23:36
  Hamlet come from? And the answer is from the story, the stuff he
• 1:23:40
  does and the stuff he says inside the context of the story. So it's
• 1:23:45
  really really all about all about story. So once the story has worked out,
• 1:23:51
  you have the opportunity to retell that story as a novel. And it's
• 1:23:56
  just easier to write a novel. It's easier because you're not stuck with this
• 1:24:00
  sight and sound like you are in a movie. You're not. You know.
• 1:24:06
  We mentioned George Cluney a moment ago. I read a screenplay called The
• 1:24:11
  American. I didn't see the movie. It's a dreadful screenplay. Cluney was
• 1:24:15
  in it. I think the only reason George was in it because it was
• 1:24:18
  shot in here where he lives in northern Italy, and I lives Lake Como
• 1:24:24
  at the edge of the Swiss border up there, and they was shot it
• 1:24:26
  up there. So I think that's the only reason I can imagine that George
• 1:24:30
  would have been, you know, had anything to do with this movie,
• 1:24:32
  would be because it was convenient. Was in the neighborhood, so so it's
• 1:24:38
  been at There's a scene in the movie where the main character is sitting is
• 1:24:44
  at a cafe ordering a bottle of wine. He's with a girl, and
• 1:24:48
  the waiter comes up and offers him, you know, taste of the wine,
• 1:24:51
  and he samples the wine, and it actually says in the script that
• 1:24:54
  he takes a ship of the wine. It takes slightly flinty, with notes
• 1:24:59
  of chess, nuts and cinnamon. Wait a minute, well, how does
• 1:25:05
  me? Well, how does anybody knows sitting in a movie theater watching them
• 1:25:09
  on screen with what something tastes like? You follow what I'm saying? Yeah,
• 1:25:13
  I knew exactly what you mean. This guy, this writer, doesn't
• 1:25:16
  understand the most fundamental aspect of screen running, which is you stuck with sitan
• 1:25:20
  sound. It's just sitan sound. It's easier to write a novel because you're
• 1:25:27
  not stuck with You can say with somebody remembers what they think, how they
• 1:25:31
  feel. You know. The greatest compliment that's ever been paid me is that
• 1:25:39
  final draft. The software. I'm sure you know of it, the screenwriting
• 1:25:44
  software has actually created. I don't know if it's available yet. We are
• 1:25:48
  creating they are creating for me in consultation with me, that Richard Walter template.
• 1:25:55
  You know, like if you want to write a if you want to
• 1:26:00
  write a Simpsons script, for example, you can you can punch up Simpsons.
• 1:26:06
  You know, there's a pull down window in Final Draft and you can
• 1:26:10
  go to Simpsons and you click that and it will immediately give you the formatting
• 1:26:15
  for the uh uh. You know the Simpsons likes that the Simpsons uses.
• 1:26:20
  And I don't mind telling you that a colleague of mine has won several Emmys
• 1:26:25
  for the Simpsons, and a bunch of us students have written for the Simpsons,
• 1:26:29
  and oh, one of them. This makes me sad because he died
• 1:26:33
  young in his forties. A wonderful writer and wonderful guy, very successful in
• 1:26:41
  not just in TV, but also in features. He wrote four he wrote
• 1:26:45
  the super Girl. Very very fine writer. He uh. He was a
• 1:26:55
  the the oh producer what are they quote? Exact producer of the Simpsons and
• 1:27:00
  a writer for the Simpsons. So Final Draft has a Simpsons template. They
• 1:27:04
  now have a Richard Walter template. If you if you punch up me,
• 1:27:10
  you'll get format that conforms to my particular desires. For example, I don't
• 1:27:15
  when if you write x E x T for exterior, you know, it's
• 1:27:21
  like extort. I was taught that you don't put and I preach it,
• 1:27:26
  you should not put a period after that. And in final draft, if
• 1:27:31
  you go to the Richard Walter template, it'll get rid of the theory that
• 1:27:33
  comes after that. Somebody might say, Kee, that seems like a pretty
• 1:27:36
  petty point, but actually I think it's the most important, the most profound
• 1:27:41
  point in all of creative expression. And the point is simply this. There
• 1:27:44
  shouldn't be anything in the script that doesn't serve the script. That is to
• 1:27:47
  say, it doesn't move the story forward. And if you learn, if
• 1:27:53
  you get into the kind of mindset that leaves out even the period after exterior,
• 1:27:56
  then you'll leave out lines of dialogue that you don't need. You leave
• 1:27:59
  that whole paracrasy they don't lead, You leave that whole scenes that you don't
• 1:28:02
  need, if you follow what I'm what I'm saying so in anyway, the
• 1:28:08
  only reason I'm telling about this is that in the Richard Walter template for final
• 1:28:13
  draft, they are now having we're tweaking it. And in the wide margin
• 1:28:16
  description, if a word like realizes feels, remembers, thinks, appears,
• 1:28:24
  It's going to get highlighted a little zig zaggy line underneath if some attention will
• 1:28:28
  be called to it, to ask the writer, do you really want to
• 1:28:31
  say this? Is this something that the audience can see or hear? Because
• 1:28:36
  if it's an internal, interior mental thing, it has no place in a
• 1:28:41
  movie. But in a novel, I mean everything in it that's interior mental
• 1:28:44
  and movie has to come out of sight and sound. You know, the
• 1:28:48
  Mariland's eyes widen in what can only be the realization that Harry left the gun
• 1:28:55
  in the nightstand at the motel. You understand what I'm saying. It's going
• 1:28:58
  to be told from a visual standpoint. Answering the question, never mind the
• 1:29:02
  reader of the spink on the page, I want to know how the viewer
• 1:29:06
  in the movie theater watching it on the screen is going to know this information.
• 1:29:13
  And but in a novel you can just spill it out. And you
• 1:29:15
  can also write in the past tense or in the future tense. I wrote
• 1:29:19
  a novel, and that's said in the past, in the present of the
• 1:29:23
  future, and in the past. I tell it in the past and in
• 1:29:27
  the future I tell it in the future tense and in the present. I
• 1:29:30
  tell it in the in the present tense. He goes to the door,
• 1:29:33
  she opens it, He stands there. You know what I'm saying. So
• 1:29:38
  you don't have to worry about that. In a novel, you can you
• 1:29:41
  can do anything you want. Also, novels are longer, and it's easier
• 1:29:45
  to write longer then shorter. Not everybody gets that. There's a it's like
• 1:29:51
  it's easier to ride a bike fast and slow. You know what I'm saying.
• 1:29:57
  It's very true. You're absolutely right. We'll be right back after a
• 1:30:01
  word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. There's a letter
• 1:30:12
  from Hemingway. There's a very famous letter from Ernest Hemingway. He was in
• 1:30:15
  Cuba, I think he was working on The Old Man in the Sea,
• 1:30:21
  and he wrote a letter to his legendary editor, Maxwell Perkins. It was
• 1:30:28
  nine pages long, on and on and on and on and on about this
• 1:30:30
  and that and the other thing in aspects of the script of the manuscript,
• 1:30:32
  the type script for Old Man of the Sea, and this and that and
• 1:30:36
  the other thing. Finally, halfway down the middle of page nine, he
• 1:30:40
  says, well that's about it for now, Max. He says, please
• 1:30:44
  forgive me for writing such a long letter. I didn't have the time to
• 1:30:45
  write a short one. It takes longer to be quick and to the point
• 1:30:53
  and to call and select and do the things that artists have to do.
• 1:30:57
  So I think there's really something to be said for writers taking another tech,
• 1:31:04
  trying their script out as a novel, trying to get some tractions there,
• 1:31:09
  and if they do, suddenly it becomes viable as a movie project because it's
• 1:31:15
  no longer original. They've taken the quote curse quotes quote off of it by
• 1:31:21
  removing its originality and making an adaptation. So you know, there's some thoughts.
• 1:31:28
  There's some thoughts. You know. It's funny you mentioned that, Richard,
• 1:31:30
  because I'm actually a Final Draft not only affiliate, but I also am
• 1:31:35
  part of their their program where we like beta testing. I'm sorry whose program
• 1:31:40
  I missed? Oh, I'm sorry. I'm actually a part of Final drafts.
• 1:31:44
  Final Draft. Yeah, not only their affiliate program, but also they're
• 1:31:47
  beta testing, so like I get the new stuff before anybody else, you
• 1:31:50
  know, and get feedback. I haven't got a chance to actually check that
• 1:31:55
  template out but one, but I'm gonna keep my eye out because yeah,
• 1:31:58
  you know, I've been working with all one hundreds Arry who's one of the
• 1:32:00
  guys, a great guy, And I don't know if it's available or not
• 1:32:04
  yet. I think it's it's an you know, like you can sort of
• 1:32:09
  upload it depending what you know, what version you have and so on.
• 1:32:14
  Yeah, and uh, because right now, the latest thing that I've been
• 1:32:16
  beta testing is, uh, they have a new app out for the iPhone
• 1:32:23
  and that's what I've been beta testing a lot of just you know, giving
• 1:32:26
  them feedback and you know, hey, I like to see this feature,
• 1:32:29
  I wouldn't like to see this feature, you know, stuff like that.
• 1:32:30
  And I'm gonna keep an eye for for that template. I'm gonna actually because
• 1:32:34
  if it's it's available, I will definitely upload that. Well, thank you,
• 1:32:39
  I'm honored that you would. It's it's not radically different, but I
• 1:32:44
  am a big believer in the less is more, no continued, absolutely nothing.
• 1:32:50
  I've argued for years and years and years that if you can embrace this
• 1:32:59
  very very fundamental precept, which is what we were just saying earlier, then
• 1:33:03
  it's just site and sound and if you can add to that just one thing,
• 1:33:09
  and that is that every site and every sound must move the story forward
• 1:33:12
  some palpable way, some identifiable way. That doesn't matter what you're right,
• 1:33:17
  That doesn't matter what this so called genre is. It doesn't matter what happens.
• 1:33:21
  People will be drawn to it. You can even have nothing happen.
• 1:33:26
  And if somehow nothing happening can move the story forward, people will pay very,
• 1:33:32
  very rapt attention to nothing happening. And I'll give you an example of
• 1:33:36
  that, and a student of mine, God blessing me, blurbs my book
• 1:33:42
  very prominently. Alexander Payne in one of his best movies, I think about
• 1:33:50
  Schmidt, starring Jack Nicholson. I think it's Nicholson's best work. The movie
• 1:33:56
  opens with Jack just sitting alone. He's an insurance salesman. It's just clearly
• 1:33:59
  his last moment, literally his last minute on the job before he retires,
• 1:34:03
  and he just sits at the desk and absolutely nothing happens. But the camera
• 1:34:08
  kind of wanders around the room and you can see the only motion in the
• 1:34:10
  room is the sweep second hand of the wall clock, and it's ticking off
• 1:34:17
  the seconds. It's like forty seconds before five o'clock, and when it hits
• 1:34:20
  five, he gets up and he leaves. You know, that's the scene.
• 1:34:25
  But it tells you so much about that man and how punctual he is,
• 1:34:29
  and how afraid he is, and how this he is, and how
• 1:34:31
  that he is and so on, that you get it. You get really
• 1:34:34
  really drawn into that. So that's why my template, if you can get
• 1:34:39
  into it, if you can find it, you'll see that it really preaches
• 1:34:42
  minimalism, that you should keep everything off the page that you can keep off
• 1:34:46
  the page. You know, if you look at my books, you see
• 1:34:48
  the front page of a screenplay. I have a model of a front play
• 1:34:53
  of screenland, and I have a model of what not to do, and
• 1:34:57
  the model of the what you should do is just the ti A little of
• 1:35:00
  the script, the name of the writer. It shouldn't stay written by or
• 1:35:05
  even merely by, much less an original screenplay written by In case you think
• 1:35:11
  you're worried, somebody might think it's the chicken salmath sandwich or a bowling ball
• 1:35:15
  or something. Well, what if it just says by, written written by?
• 1:35:20
  What does that tell you? It tells you nothing if it simply says
• 1:35:26
  bottom dollar, you know, Sam Smith, people are gonna say you this
• 1:35:31
  script is called bottom Dollar and this guy Sam Smith probably wrote it, you
• 1:35:34
  know. And then on the only other thing you should have on that page
• 1:35:39
  is a phone number and an email address, you know, contact info.
• 1:35:44
  Now, if you have an agent, she's going to be sending out on
• 1:35:47
  her own. You know, she's not going to want potential buyers to contact
• 1:35:53
  the clients. She's going to want them to contact her. And by the
• 1:35:55
  way, the author should not want to be contacted directly. Be suspicious of
• 1:35:58
  anybody contact if you have a representative, if they are legitimate, if the
• 1:36:03
  producer legitimate, should be willing to and eager to call the producer, you
• 1:36:09
  know what I'm saying. So it's different if the thing is sold. But
• 1:36:13
  if it's a speculative script, if you just have the name of the script,
• 1:36:18
  the title of the script, in the name of the writer. And
• 1:36:20
  as I say, a phone number, one phone number, only one phone
• 1:36:25
  number. I have a bunch of phone numbers. I have my UCLA number,
• 1:36:28
  I have my home number, I have a cell number, I have
• 1:36:31
  his best number in my home office. They don't want all of that.
• 1:36:34
  They don't want my mother's number, they don't want my lawyers. I'm you
• 1:36:39
  know, just one number and one email. Is this so that you can
• 1:36:43
  be found if people people are interested. And as I say, if it
• 1:36:46
  even simply says by somebody who puts that on the script on the front page,
• 1:36:51
  doesn't get it. That right on the cover of the script is information
• 1:36:57
  that serves no purpose at all. What is the likelihood that somebody's going to
• 1:37:02
  miss that? But get character and story and dialogue and all of the sophisticated
• 1:37:08
  and heady and provocative precepts and principles that apply to the autonocraft in the business
• 1:37:15
  of screenwriting. You know, it's you know, not encouraging. So again
• 1:37:24
  that's what you'll see is very very minimal. Anything that can be lost,
• 1:37:29
  you should lose. And if you're in doubt about something, you sort of
• 1:37:30
  feel, well, maybe you need this. Maybe then you lose it.
• 1:37:34
  If you're in doubt, throw it out. Just have stuff that absolutely must
• 1:37:39
  be there. And it's so easy to figure out what must be there.
• 1:37:45
  You just ask yourself, what if it weren't there, does it still make
• 1:37:49
  sense? If it makes sense without it being then it wasn't needed. If
• 1:37:56
  the whole thing falls apart without you know, when it's not there, then
• 1:38:00
  it was needed. You follow what I'm saying. It's like there's a there's
• 1:38:03
  a joke. A guy goes into a library and he steps up to the
• 1:38:11
  desk and he says, to the library, and I'll have a hot dog
• 1:38:14
  and a coke and French fries please, And the librarian system sir, this
• 1:38:23
  is a library. He says, Oh, I'm sorry, I have a
• 1:38:27
  himp. I'll have a hot dog. Whisper. Is it? You get
• 1:38:31
  the joke. It's like, you're not supposed to talk loud in the library.
• 1:38:34
  He thinks that she's reprimanding him. It's talking too loudly, rather than
• 1:38:39
  for ordering food at a library desk. You follow the joke. Yeah,
• 1:38:43
  absolutely, So the reason I tell you that joke is you can imagine if
• 1:38:45
  that were a screenplay, a portion of a screenplay. You absolutely have to
• 1:38:50
  have the parenthetical direction and whispers sir, this is a library, carry whispering
• 1:38:59
  and the line again you with me if if if you don't have it,
• 1:39:04
  the the person who's going isn't going to whisper, and the whole joke is
• 1:39:08
  lost. So you needed the parents edicle. But that's the exception. One
• 1:39:13
  of my great battles is against parents edicles. It's a sure sign of amateurism
• 1:39:21
  where there are a lot of parents edicles. Riley Rolly angrily smiling. You
• 1:39:30
  know, sadly Shakespeare got through thirty six or thirty seven plays not a single
• 1:39:36
  parents edicle, you know, Hamlet, Melane College never. So you want
• 1:39:41
  the least, and you can figure out what the least is by asking yourself,
• 1:39:46
  what if this weren't here, does it still make sense? Then we
• 1:39:51
  didn't need it. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 1:40:00
  and now back to the show. So that answers the question that every artist
• 1:40:05
  is confronted with, which is what needs to be in the work and what
• 1:40:09
  doesn't and why doesn't everybody do that? And the answer is it takes time
• 1:40:15
  to do that, and that's what people won't give it. They just won't
• 1:40:18
  give it the time that it takes. You know. One of my one
• 1:40:24
  of my mentors, Bill boyle Uh, he actually wrote a book called The
• 1:40:27
  Visual Mindscape of the screen Play, and he goes into that in depth,
• 1:40:30
  that you have to take out anything that is not you know, it's always
• 1:40:35
  about what's on the screen, all the good and it always and he's that
• 1:40:41
  way, uh because he says he always would see people hanging in screenplays and
• 1:40:45
  they would say things that like, you know what someone is thinking in a
• 1:40:48
  screenplay? And he's like, how can we show that stuff exactly exactly?
• 1:40:55
  You know, Evelyn remembers that the she left the car our idling. Well,
• 1:41:00
  what does that look like on the screen? Somebody remembering something? You
• 1:41:03
  know? And how you're gonna know? Uh, Let's say the actor looks
• 1:41:09
  up remembering and acting for dummies, if there is such a thing, and
• 1:41:14
  is able to put on the remembering face. If there is such a thing,
• 1:41:16
  then how do we know what they remembering? You know? Again,
• 1:41:20
  it's so simple. It's it's really very simple, very simple to know what
• 1:41:27
  to do to succeed. Why it isn't everybody to see because it's hard to
• 1:41:30
  do it. It's easy to know what you do. It's like I don't
• 1:41:33
  know exactly what to do to hit a home run. I'm sitting here about
• 1:41:39
  two months from Dodger Stadium, and I know exactly what you have to do.
• 1:41:44
  You have to get to bat around in the right place at the right
• 1:41:45
  time. The difference between me and you know, Babe Ruth is that he
• 1:41:50
  could do it. He didn't merely know how to do it, but actually
• 1:41:54
  could do it. I know how to do but I can't do it.
• 1:41:57
  I don't have an equipment to do it. So it's really you know that,
• 1:42:04
  that's really all there is too And again the reason people don't do it
• 1:42:10
  is they in too much of a hurry. Had a writer just tell me
• 1:42:15
  it's already, this is already a third draft. Well, come on,
• 1:42:17
  David Kepp, I bet you know the name Koepp, a former student of
• 1:42:24
  mine, a writer director. He wrote you know, Mission Impossible, Jurassic
• 1:42:31
  Park one and two. Right now he's writing the second chapter of the Ron
• 1:42:40
  Howard of the Da Vinci Code. I mean, he's a gigantic successful writer,
• 1:42:44
  also a very very sweet man. He says the secret of his success
• 1:42:46
  is seventeen drafts. He knows he can get through seventeen drafts. He says,
• 1:42:51
  that take seventeen drafts to hear somebody complaining to me about their third draft,
• 1:42:57
  you know, and they don't like hearing me telling them. You're just
• 1:43:00
  getting started. You know, you gotta If you could get one more draft
• 1:43:03
  out of this, then you'll only need about thirteen more after that, you
• 1:43:06
  know. And that stops a lot of people. They just don't have the
• 1:43:15
  what some people call z it's flesh, uh, you know, the ability
• 1:43:19
  to sit there. The flesh would tolerate just sitting there reworking it, reworking
• 1:43:27
  it, reworking it. You know, in my own experience, you know,
• 1:43:30
  Richard, I wrote a It was a comedy horror movie and it was
• 1:43:34
  about at a at a summer camp. And summer camp, uh, it's
• 1:43:40
  a made up summer camp I had, uh huh. And the the I'm
• 1:43:45
  about seven or eight drafts in now, and some people feel that these drafts.
• 1:43:51
  Some people have said, who write it? They said, listen,
• 1:43:54
  these drafts are better. Some are saying, you're starting to get maybe a
• 1:43:58
  little too far away from the original concept. And you know, and now,
• 1:44:01
  you know, I sort of judge for myself. I sort of have
• 1:44:04
  to say, you know, who's writing a situation? Well, you know,
• 1:44:08
  and I sort of go back and and there was at one point,
• 1:44:11
  I'm gonna be honest with you, I was so burned out from rewriting this
• 1:44:14
  thing. I was like, I was fearing opening up final draft and looking
• 1:44:17
  at this thing again. Well, that's every writer has that experience. It's
• 1:44:23
  actually a good sign, but do go on. And at that point I
• 1:44:28
  actually, uh, you know, I printed it out. And one of
• 1:44:30
  my favorite things to do is actually just printed out and I make marks with
• 1:44:33
  just a pen, you know, sort of I cut myself off from all
• 1:44:35
  technology, just me and a you know, a ninety or excellent, excellent
• 1:44:43
  thing to do. I also think, uh, it really makes a lot
• 1:44:46
  of sense to write something else, put it aside, work on something else,
• 1:44:50
  and then you'll be able to come back to it with fresh eyes.
• 1:44:56
  You know. Over the last number of years, I've become a a fanatic
• 1:45:00
  crossword puzzle guy. I do it the New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle every
• 1:45:03
  Sunday. And one thing that I learned doing crossword puzzles is you, you
• 1:45:09
  know, you go through, you get what you can get, and then
• 1:45:12
  the stuff you just can't get. And funnily, you're just reading all the
• 1:45:15
  clues and you fill them maybe a little less than half the thing, and
• 1:45:17
  you just still you can't get another freaking thing. You just can't, and
• 1:45:23
  you feel defeated and stupid, and so you put it aside, just go
• 1:45:27
  up and do something else, come back to it later. You sit down
• 1:45:29
  and suddenly wam wa wa wa. When this thing, gap thing, this
• 1:45:31
  thing, it all leaps, you know, into relief that you can write
• 1:45:36
  in and almost run your hand over and feel it like a freeze on a
• 1:45:40
  temple, you know, a carved marble freeze. And it teaches me that
• 1:45:47
  just like the body gets tired, the muscles get tired, the mind gets
• 1:45:51
  tired. And when you rest the muscles and they recover, so also can
• 1:45:56
  you rest the mind and it recovers. And you look away from something,
• 1:46:00
  you look at something too careful, you really can't see it. You kind
• 1:46:03
  of look away, and then you look back and there it suddenly. As
• 1:46:05
  I'm reminded of when I was an undergraduate student in Binghamton, New York,
• 1:46:10
  as a you know, history major in college. Binghamton is in Broome County,
• 1:46:16
  New York, and I remember going through some original letters that had to
• 1:46:21
  do with Broom County history, and they've been written in like the early eighteen
• 1:46:26
  hundreds, and there was a you know, they were concluded in some state
• 1:46:30
  archives, some kind of the archive or something like that. They were contained
• 1:46:33
  there, they were housed there, and they're written in this ancient kind of
• 1:46:39
  script, you know, handwriting and sometimes I just can't read what it says.
• 1:46:44
  I remember my teacher telling me, you're looking at it too hard,
• 1:46:47
  look away from it, and then kind of sneak up on it, and
• 1:46:50
  suddenhow suddenly in context it all leaps out. You know. So if you
• 1:46:56
  take time away from you, you really step in your script to let your
• 1:47:00
  eighth draft. And when I say you, I mean any writer, what
• 1:47:03
  about put it aside for a while and work on something else and then come
• 1:47:06
  back to it. And as far as you're getting too far away from your
• 1:47:10
  original concept, maybe there's something better than your original concept. Maybe you've taken
• 1:47:14
  it to a place that's even better for it to be. One more thing
• 1:47:18
  on this subject, and it goes back to David Tepp in the seventeen draft.
• 1:47:21
  He says, very often the latest drafts mimic the earliest draft. You
• 1:47:28
  sort of get back to the beginning of it, and you get back to
• 1:47:31
  that context, that original concept that you had, And that might seem like
• 1:47:38
  a ferocious waste of time, but it wasn't. You needed to go through
• 1:47:42
  all of that to see that this is the way it really ought to be.
• 1:47:46
  I was talking to writer only the other week a few weeks ago.
• 1:47:49
  Who was I ran and I haven't seen him in a long time, A
• 1:47:51
  guy I know pretty well, but I don't seen a long time any now.
• 1:47:54
  And he says, well, much better now. I said, what
• 1:47:56
  do you mean? He said, Well, I was stuck for ten months
• 1:47:58
  this year. I was struggling with this script and I just pumpfort and hesitated
• 1:48:04
  and stumbled and just couldn't make any pregress with it at all, and it
• 1:48:10
  haunted me and it tortured me. And then finally two weeks ago, I
• 1:48:15
  just settled in and said, screw this, I'm going to do this.
• 1:48:18
  And I remember right through it and I got it and you know, and
• 1:48:21
  nailed it and it's just great, you know. And that's why I'm upset.
• 1:48:28
  I said, I don't understand. Why, Why Why is that a
• 1:48:31
  setting? It sounds like like a nice thing. He said, Well,
• 1:48:34
  I struggled with this thing for the nine or ten months. Why don't I
• 1:48:39
  just do this ten months ago? You know? And I wouldn't have had
• 1:48:41
  all of the darkness and all of the pain that I had. And I
• 1:48:44
  said to him, you couldn't have done this ten months ago. You needed
• 1:48:47
  to struggle and suffer and have all of this pain and live all of this
• 1:48:51
  life of the last nine to ten months to become the person that you are
• 1:48:56
  that could have you know, who's also the person that could finish this script,
• 1:48:59
  you know, right, this script. So that's where it goes.
• 1:49:02
  You know, nothing new about writers beating up on themselves. So I mean
• 1:49:09
  what I ended up doing was I ended up Actually I did work on something
• 1:49:12
  else. I just at that point I said, you know what, I
• 1:49:15
  think I should just take a break from this, and I'm thinking about coming
• 1:49:19
  back to it very soon. And because it's been about probably a month or
• 1:49:23
  may month, I him and I think now it's probably better you can come
• 1:49:27
  around full circle now and and just again start draft nine and see where that
• 1:49:30
  takes me. Look, my first novel was I told you about it earlier.
• 1:49:39
  I had written it as a screenplay and couldn't get any action. I
• 1:49:42
  wrote as a novel, and it's what it is, a screenplay years later,
• 1:49:50
  and by the way, it taught me a lot of work. You
• 1:49:53
  know, it was an adolescent coming of age story. We'll be right back
• 1:49:59
  after word from our sponsor and now back to the show. And given that
• 1:50:11
  on my drafts of Merdan graffiti, which is, uh, you know,
• 1:50:14
  an adolescent loss of innocence, right of passage, coming of age story.
• 1:50:17
  I was able to get a lot of work. I was kind of the
• 1:50:18
  go to guy for adolescent kind of age stories, loss of innocence stories in
• 1:50:24
  Hollywood. That novel after I saw and it's a kind of a I grew
• 1:50:31
  up in New York City and I sang do op in the streets with friends
• 1:50:34
  of mine and so and so. It's about this do op group that never
• 1:50:38
  really succeeds, but they learned that if you're singing harmony, you'll live in
• 1:50:42
  harmony, you know. And after I saw it, I started thinking about
• 1:50:45
  it as a stage play. You know, it's a musical, but I
• 1:50:53
  needed a songwriter. And then after I saw Jersey Boys, I was seeing
• 1:50:57
  it several times on Broadway, I realized, no, it could be a
• 1:51:00
  jukebox musical, and so I rewrote it as I adapted it for the musical
• 1:51:06
  theater using existing tunes, you know, just like the Carol King Show and
• 1:51:11
  the Motown Musical you know, and Jersey Boys, you know, are just
• 1:51:17
  examples. There are a lot of them. Now am not using original music,
• 1:51:21
  but that's why they called jukebox musicals because they use existing tunes. I
• 1:51:27
  suddenly realized I could do it as a jukebox musical, so I rewrote it
• 1:51:30
  as a jukebox musical. Two years ago it was workshop at UCLA. There
• 1:51:38
  was a humble read through sing through directed by one of the professors in the
• 1:51:45
  musical theater program in our sister department Theater. It was the most satisfying,
• 1:51:51
  fulfilling creative experience I've ever had in my career, this humble little read through.
• 1:51:57
  Now there's a somebody eagerly show the play around trying to get a production
• 1:52:02
  for it. Probably nothing will come of it, but but my you know,
• 1:52:08
  the craziest things have happened. But the point is, and the reason
• 1:52:10
  I bother you with it telling you about it is, Look how long I
• 1:52:13
  have there even business with this thing. It goes back over forty years before,
• 1:52:18
  you know, between the time that I first started outlining what became the
• 1:52:23
  screenplay, which ultimately became the novel, and so on. My most recent
• 1:52:28
  novel, which which I bragged to you, made the Times List, I
• 1:52:31
  also wrote originally as a screenplay. And I'm talking about over thirty years ago,
• 1:52:42
  probably thirty one of thirty two years ago. I wrote it as a
• 1:52:45
  screenplay. It was optioned and dropped, an optioned and dropped. I made
• 1:52:48
  some money on it. It was optioned by you know, an Oscar winning
• 1:52:53
  multi Oscar winning independent company of air prestigious companies. I made some money on
• 1:52:59
  it, but I never got anywhere with it. It never got produced.
• 1:53:03
  So eventually a student of mine at UCLA I was talking about the project.
• 1:53:11
  He said he'd love to read it. So it convinced me to let him
• 1:53:13
  read it, and he came to me and he said, you should use
• 1:53:15
  this as an outline for a novel, a comic novel. So I did,
• 1:53:21
  and when that was done, I showed it around to the publishing business
• 1:53:28
  and I couldn't get any interest in it at all. All I had with
• 1:53:31
  it was frustration and heartache and as I say, disappointment then, I mean
• 1:53:38
  I'd made some money on it, you know, in the early days when
• 1:53:41
  it was a film script and I got those options, but generally it had
• 1:53:43
  been a pretty big disappointment. Then I met an editor, and I'm sorry,
• 1:53:46
  I met a very powerful agent. I have been so privileged in my
• 1:53:49
  life to do the things that I've done. One of them is for five
• 1:53:56
  summers. I would take the whole family to Maui for the writer's conference late
• 1:53:59
  in the summer. And if it had been in a Motel six, that'd
• 1:54:01
  be okay, it's Maui. But it wasn't in the motel six. It
• 1:54:04
  was in the ground while I lay a five diamond luxury spa hotel resort,
• 1:54:10
  you know, just an incredible place. And there I would meet all of
• 1:54:14
  these heavyweights from both literature and film. We mentioned Stephen King earlier. Stephen
• 1:54:20
  was there, you know. I mean, they had world class writers,
• 1:54:26
  both in the movie business and in the literature business. And I remember I
• 1:54:30
  met an agent there and she said to me, a very powerful New York
• 1:54:36
  agent, and she agreed to I pitched the project to her, and she
• 1:54:41
  agreed to read it on the mainland when she got back to the mainland.
• 1:54:44
  So I sent it to her in New York and she called me up and
• 1:54:46
  she said, and this is like twenty This is twenty years after I had
• 1:54:53
  first written, and about fifteen years ago. If you're with me, she
• 1:55:00
  said, I have to tell you. I read your tape script and I
• 1:55:04
  think it's great and I want to represent it and I'll represent it exactly as
• 1:55:09
  it is if you want me to, I'll send it out exactly as you've
• 1:55:12
  written it. However, I have an editor here in the office that I
• 1:55:15
  work with, and I think you should get notes from Miriam. And if
• 1:55:23
  you don't like the notes, you know, then the hell of it off,
• 1:55:28
  you know, drum away. I'll show the book as this. But
• 1:55:30
  I have to tell you, Richard. She said to me that when my
• 1:55:34
  office work with Miriam, I sew this stuff right away. Now I charge
• 1:55:38
  thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars for notes, and they're not charging me
• 1:55:42
  a nickel for this, you understand now. I wanted to say to them,
• 1:55:45
  please, I'm not interested in rewrite. I had nothing but grief from
• 1:55:48
  this project, and I'm depressed and lost at the moment, this moment in
• 1:55:56
  my life, and I hardly feel like going into some old thing that's been
• 1:56:00
  nothing but discipline all the way. And you've already said you show it as
• 1:56:03
  this, Just show it as it is. I didn't say this, mind
• 1:56:05
  you, David, I just was. This was my thinking, you understand.
• 1:56:12
  So I said to myself, don't tell her how much you hate the
• 1:56:15
  notes until you see the notes. In other words, wait for the notes
• 1:56:17
  and then tell them that, yeah, you know, you really appreciate Miriam
• 1:56:23
  doing what she did, but no, you want to stick with what you
• 1:56:26
  had in the hell with us, you don't have to do any more work,
• 1:56:27
  right And by the way, who the fuck is this Miriam? Some
• 1:56:33
  twenty three year old who just got out of you know, creative writing major
• 1:56:38
  from Suave Moore or Brin Moore or one of them. More's you know,
• 1:56:42
  don't they know who I am? And on and on, you know,
• 1:56:45
  that kind of insulated view of self the writer can get and become his own
• 1:56:49
  worst enemy. Of course I said none of that. Well that was my
• 1:56:53
  thinking. So finally the notes come from Miriam. By the way, it's
• 1:56:59
  Miriam go to she's now a partner in the agency. It's Thistle go to
• 1:57:03
  its now. And I read Miriam's notes, and you know what, David,
• 1:57:08
  the notes. My heart sinks like a stone when I read these notes,
• 1:57:11
  because they have such good notes, and I know I'm looking at my
• 1:57:15
  worst enemy. And when I brush my teeth, when I shave, if
• 1:57:18
  you follow me, if I don't get my button a chair, my hands
• 1:57:23
  on the keys and find the old files and get get back into it right.
• 1:57:28
  So I certainly didn't want to do that, but I did. And
• 1:57:30
  by the way, the moment I started, i'd written two three sentences.
• 1:57:34
  I suddenly was born again. The fog lifted, the depression was gone.
• 1:57:39
  I was sealed by the wonderful nurturing juices the photo through the system when you
• 1:57:46
  when you, you know, get involved in creative expression. And it took
• 1:57:51
  me a couple of months, you know, to get the script attended to
• 1:57:56
  in the way that had been recommended, and then I out of back to
• 1:58:00
  the agency and bingo, they sold it right away. As I've told you,
• 1:58:03
  it made the Times List best seller. You know, it's a Times
• 1:58:08
  best seller, and there was a lot of movie action around it, but
• 1:58:15
  nothing ever came of it as a movie. Now all that ever comes of
• 1:58:17
  it as it was a best selling novel. That's such a bad thing,
• 1:58:19
  isn't. But guess what, I'm going to London. I'm going to be
• 1:58:24
  at the London Screenwriters Festival in October. And a British producer called me.
• 1:58:32
  He said that he's he's actually American producer, but he's British based. He's
• 1:58:35
  London based, and he said he has. This was a few years ago,
• 1:58:43
  this was three or four years ago. He'd come upon the novel and
• 1:58:46
  he thought it'd make a great movie and he wanted to option the rights to
• 1:58:50
  it. Well, nothing ever came of that, more frustration and disappointment.
• 1:58:54
  Now suddenly he calls me, just coincidentally, I'm going to be in London
• 1:58:58
  in the fall, and he says, guess when he made a movie with
• 1:59:02
  a He produced a movie that was directed by a new director, a short
• 1:59:09
  film, and on the strength of that short film, that director has been
• 1:59:14
  signed by a very very prominent agency and they have asked him to bring projects
• 1:59:20
  to them that he would like to do. So he asked this producer,
• 1:59:24
  and producer called me and said, is your novel still available? And it
• 1:59:28
  is so right now as we're talking, it's being shown not by me,
• 1:59:32
  but by an artist who's been signed by a major agency who have asked him
• 1:59:40
  to show them stuff that he wants to do. Do you understand how much
• 1:59:43
  better that is for the material to be exposed to them that way than for
• 1:59:45
  me, the author to call their attention to it. You follow what I'm
• 1:59:48
  saying, Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. And on top of that,
• 1:59:53
  it's conceivable that they will be showing it to producers and production companies. We'll
• 2:00:01
  be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the
• 2:00:09
  show. I would rather be represented, if anything comes of it, by
• 2:00:15
  a lawyer rather than an agent. But if they want to go out with
• 2:00:18
  this thing, and they approach me and they want to want me to let
• 2:00:21
  them represent them on it, I'll do that in a heartbeat. It's better
• 2:00:26
  for me to have them motivated, you know, extra motivated. Follow my
• 2:00:30
  reasoning there, If they can represent me as well as the director, they're
• 2:00:34
  going to be that much more motivated to sell the thing. So the likely
• 2:00:40
  there's nothing that will come of it. But here we are. We're talking
• 2:00:42
  in twenty fifteen, midway through the year just about, and I'm still in
• 2:00:46
  business on this thing that I started writing in like nineteen eighty. So you
• 2:00:53
  see what a mistake it is for writers to do what they often do,
• 2:00:56
  which is a writer script that doesn't sell. That's the end of it.
• 2:00:58
  They think it was a failure. Mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake,
• 2:01:01
  mistake. Yeah, and you know that that's, you know, very true.
• 2:01:05
  I have a friend of mine also who he's you know, in his
• 2:01:12
  forties or fifties, but he wrote a screenplay, you know, in his
• 2:01:14
  twenties and then suddenly, you know, that's becoming a light again and you
• 2:01:16
  know, uh, you know again, like you were saying, you know,
• 2:01:20
  it's it's amazing how these things get new life. You know, years
• 2:01:25
  David webbed people's you know, he won the Oscar for Unforgiven. It was
• 2:01:29
  also the best best movie that year. Clint hung onto that script for twenty
• 2:01:33
  years, and Clint made another movie that was very successful, didn't win the
• 2:01:38
  Oscar, but it was very successful about the the Secret Service guy takes the
• 2:01:42
  bullet for the President in the line of Fire. And that's another script that
• 2:01:45
  was hanging around for fifteen sixty years. The writer and that strip was packing
• 2:01:49
  his trunk of his car and getting ready to you know, go back and
• 2:01:54
  defeat with this tale between his legs back to New Hampshire when the film rings
• 2:01:59
  a small puss Oaklin's company and you know, they want to know that,
• 2:02:02
  they want him to know that they wanted to come in for some meetings about
• 2:02:05
  brushing up the script. There they now have a schedule they're going to go
• 2:02:10
  ahead and you know, produce it. For eighty eight million dollars something like
• 2:02:14
  that. You just never know. People don't understand that when a script doesn't
• 2:02:17
  sell, it's not the end. If it's the beginning, that script might
• 2:02:20
  sell eventually. But even if it doesn't, it's a sample of your craft.
• 2:02:27
  It could lead to representation. It could lead to a development deal on
• 2:02:32
  another notion that you have in mind. It could lead to a rewrite assignment.
• 2:02:39
  I've seen all of these things happen. They've happened to me, they've
• 2:02:44
  happened to writers that I know, And that is why it is a terrible
• 2:02:50
  self defeating mistake to imagine that a script that doesn't sell that's the end of
• 2:02:58
  it. It's a failure. The very script I ever wrote, I wrote
• 2:03:00
  in a class at USC. It was in the legendary The instructor was the
• 2:03:06
  legendary Irwin ar Blacker, who was George's teacher and John Melius's teacher, and
• 2:03:12
  on and on. That script never sold, but I got top flight representation
• 2:03:21
  as a result of it. I got a onto staff at Universal. And
• 2:03:28
  here I was a young kid. I wasn't you know. I was in
• 2:03:30
  my twenties and I had an office at Universal with my name on the door
• 2:03:33
  a parking place next to Paul Newman's parking place. I noticed a ridiculously generous
• 2:03:42
  salary, at least it seemed that way at the time. Actually adjust different
• 2:03:45
  inflation was pretty generous. And it all came to that from a script that
• 2:03:49
  hasn't sold, you know, to this day. So to consider that script
• 2:03:54
  to be a failure is lacy and very buious business. The business is hard
• 2:04:01
  enough on writers. Writers don't need to be hard on themselves, is the
• 2:04:04
  point that I'm making. And yeah, and that that's an excellent point,
• 2:04:09
  and that that sort of leads me into you know, one of my last
• 2:04:12
  questions. I know we've been talking about two hours. I know I've been
• 2:04:15
  taken up a lot of you delight. It is that we don't want to
• 2:04:15
  make sure we do cover I do talk a little bit about the uh,
• 2:04:19
  the summer session, that class that I offer, So go ahead and ask
• 2:04:23
  me a question and then I'll talk a little bit about that. That's actually
• 2:04:25
  the question I was going to ask you was, you know, I know
• 2:04:28
  you have a you know, upcoming summer session and this is the only time
• 2:04:30
  of the year where non UCLA students can sign up and I wondered if you
• 2:04:35
  could just you know, talk a little bit about the class and you know,
• 2:04:38
  for anyone listening, who's you know, interested in signing up. Well,
• 2:04:42
  the first thing I'll say is just that the housekeeping. If you want
• 2:04:44
  to find out official information about it, h you can do that by simply
• 2:04:49
  going to my website Richard Walter dot com. There is no asset the end
• 2:04:53
  of my name Richard Walter dot com. And I think the very first thing
• 2:04:57
  on the side is a link that will take it to the use cla site
• 2:05:00
  that describes enrollment procedures and tells me a little bit of the class. It
• 2:05:03
  also tells me something wrong about the class, which is that there are certain
• 2:05:09
  prerequisites for the summer session. All prerequisites are waived and the class is open
• 2:05:15
  to the classes especially designed for the summer session. I've taught it for thirty
• 2:05:19
  over thirty years now. It meets starting on June twenty second, Monday,
• 2:05:25
  June twenty second, Monday afternoon and for the next five that is a total
• 2:05:30
  of six Monday afternoon sessions. It's not electric course, it's hands on writing
• 2:05:34
  course where you get The main activity of the class is the in class examination
• 2:05:43
  of in progress scripts being written by students in the class, so you get
• 2:05:45
  not only the support of the teacher and the teaching assistants, but also your
• 2:05:54
  fellow writers around the table. And one thing that has touched me very deeply
• 2:05:58
  all these years is how generous everyone is. All the writers are with everybody
• 2:06:00
  else, how much support that the writers give each other. I feel like
• 2:06:05
  I've learned much more than I've ever taught, you know, being at UCLA,
• 2:06:10
  and my students are my teachers. So you get all of that alive.
• 2:06:14
  It's not online, it's alive in a classroom. And it is a
• 2:06:18
  rare course in that it's very difficult to get into it. Even if you're
• 2:06:25
  a registered matriculated UCLA student. It's very hard to get into an advanced film
• 2:06:30
  class with senior faculty like me. So this is an opportunity to do that,
• 2:06:35
  not only for UCLA students, but even for students who are not enrolled
• 2:06:39
  at UCLA. And by the way, everybody gets eight credits for it.
• 2:06:43
  Those credits are useful at anybody, you know, for anybody at any University
• 2:06:48
  California campus. But also they're transferable depending upon the attitude of the institution.
• 2:06:54
  They're transferable to other institutions, though I would say most people take the class
• 2:07:00
  really aren't interested in the credits. They're interested in getting the attention and consideration
• 2:07:03
  that you know, our regular students get when they write their their screenplays.
• 2:07:09
  So it's a really upbeat six weeks together. And uh, it's limited enrollment.
• 2:07:18
  It's almost sold out, but there is still some room for some people.
• 2:07:23
  I want you to know that I don't get paid per student. I
• 2:07:26
  don't get paid on a per student fee. Rather I get a flat fee.
• 2:07:30
  And the only is I tell you that is that I'm not trying to
• 2:07:31
  self act grand buys here. I'm not against self promotion and I'm not against
• 2:07:35
  making money, but I'm not I don't get any extra money if you know,
• 2:07:41
  extra students enroll or anything like I just want anything like that. I
• 2:07:45
  just want your readers and listeners, the people that you reach, I want
• 2:07:51
  them to know that this is a rare opportunity. It's not that widely known,
• 2:07:56
  it is available to them. And we crank up two weeks from Monday.
• 2:08:03
  It's not too late to register people commute. By the way, it's
• 2:08:07
  obviously most convenient for people in the southern California region, but there are people
• 2:08:11
  who commute from all across the country. I had somebody last summer commuting from
• 2:08:16
  Illinois. The previous summer, I had a couple I were, a doctor
• 2:08:20
  and his wife coming commuting every Monday. They would fly in to La from
• 2:08:28
  El Paso and take the class and then fly back, you know, either
• 2:08:31
  late that night or the following morning. That's how motivated people ought to take
• 2:08:37
  the class. And I would commend it to you know, all of the
• 2:08:41
  people that you reach. And you know, I've actually I've known people who've
• 2:08:46
  actually taken the course, and you know, I'll probably I'll mention their names
• 2:08:50
  when we get affchered ox. You probably know, you probably remember a few
• 2:08:52
  of them. And they spoke very very highly of the course. Oh thank
• 2:08:56
  you, and uh, you know, and again I mean to work with
• 2:09:01
  someone who's actually been in the fields, but in the trenches, it's just,
• 2:09:03
  you know, it's unbelievable. And you know, I again, I
• 2:09:07
  will link to your your upcoming class in the show notes. You know,
• 2:09:11
  and everyone. I also recommended to check out Richard's book Essentials of Screenwriting.
• 2:09:16
  I have a copy behind me. I swear rich Or you can't see it,
• 2:09:18
  but it's on the massive bookshelf behind me. But Richard, you know
• 2:09:24
  I've taken up so much of your time today. I want to say thank
• 2:09:26
  you very much. It's like flick. I enjoy channing. I really truly
• 2:09:30
  did. David. Oh, and I would love to have you back on
• 2:09:31
  if you ever wanted to. Absolutely, you know how to reach carefully.
• 2:09:35
  She kind of handles my calendar and I'd love to come back. Be a
• 2:09:41
  pleasure to do that. Excellent, because there's a ton of questions that we
• 2:09:43
  never got a chance that I never got a chance to ask you because I
• 2:09:46
  mean there's so many and there's so many things we could talk about. Well,
• 2:09:48
  one thing I've learned about the questions and answers, and that is really
• 2:09:52
  good. Answers just lead lead to more questions, you know, so,
• 2:09:56
  and there's nothing wrong with that. That is the nature of learning. Absolutely,
• 2:10:00
  uh you know everyone you can check Richard at Richard Walter dot com and
• 2:10:05
  yes, rich exactly right. And Richard, I want to say one more
• 2:10:07
  time, thank you again for coming on, and I well, thanks for
• 2:10:09
  having me David. Thank you. Oh, it's my pleasure. I'm so
• 2:10:13
  afford to chatting with you. Again we will do it for sure. Amazing
• 2:10:18
  Again everyone, thanks again for listening, and Richard, I wish you would
• 2:10:20
  have a great day and uh you know, best of luck with all your
• 2:10:22
  projects. Back to you and thank you so kindly. Thank you care now,
• 2:10:26
  bye bye bye bye. I want to thank Dave so much for doing
• 2:10:31
  such a great job on this episode. If you want to get links to
• 2:10:33
  anything we spoke about in this episode, head over to the show notes at
• 2:10:37
  any film muscle dot com forward slash seven sixteen and if you haven't already,
• 2:10:41
  please head over to Filmmaking podcast dot com. Subscribe and leave a good review
• 2:10:48
  for the show. It really helps us out a lot, guys. Thank
• 2:10:50
  you again so much for listening. Guys, as always, keep that hustle
• 2:10:52
  going, keep that dream alive, stay safe out there, and I'll talk
• 2:10:56
  too soon. Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle pun Cast at Indie
• 2:11:01
  film huscle dot com. That's I N D I E F I L M
• 2:11:05
  h U S T L E dot com.